dusted magazine: the first 11 years archive album reviews dust listed listening post midyear roundups end of the year: 2025end of the year: 2024end of the year: 2023end of the year: 2022end of the year: 2021 end of the year: 2020 end of the year: 2019 end of the year: 2018 end of the year: 2017 end of the year: 2016 end of the year: 2015 end of the year: 2014 end of the year: 2013 what happened to the old site?
Depending on how you are geared, you may find it entertaining that two of the songs on Reality Soldier, Gunner’s ferocious new EP, are titled “The Bad Lieutenant” and “Here Come the Warm Jets.” At least the former has a kind of superficial relevance to the variety of raw hardcore Gunner specializes in: Play this 7” record loud enough and you’ll summon authorities of some sort. If the nameless NYPD detective from Abel Ferrara’s notorious 1992 film shows up, he might dig the tunes. Certainly the music’s unhinged, borderline psychotic sensibility would constitute familiar environmental input for him.
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Why the Aussie punks in Gunner nod to Brian Eno’s 1974 record is a lot less clear. This reviewer can discover no “warm guitars” in Gunner’s song, and there are none of Eno’s careful atmospherics. It’s all white heat, buzzsaw grind and vocals so redolent with contempt that Johnny Rotten, c 1977, might advise a mite of moderation. Moderation of any sort does not seem to be imminent in Gunner’s music. The drums sometimes leave rhythmic structures behind entirely in the intensity of their abandon. When you advance about 90 seconds into the EP, a breakdown (toward the end of “MDD”) inflicts a brief coherence on the noise, but the feedback rolls into the next track, and here comes that aforementioned Bad Lieutenant, staggering into the frame.
You can’t blame him — it can be hard to find any sort of sustained orientation in Reality Soldier’s 12 minutes. Funnily enough, it’s the last 40 seconds of “Imbalance” that feel most balanced, regularly patterned and almost enjoyable. Gunner makes you pay for it. The next tune is “Subjectivity Bomb,” an aptly titled 64 seconds of brain-deranging racket. Pretty fancy lingo, that. But one can also ask just how distinct that 64 seconds is from any other minute of experience in this foul year of 2026. Soldier on, punks.
After posting about Dusted mainstay Jennifer Kelly’s cancer diagnosis, we received an email from one of the artists Jenny has reviewed here.
“She gave my records her time and attention," he said, "and she does the same with many, many artists around the world. An authoritative professional gives our music a chance. It means a lot to me, and I believe it means the same to many artists.
I want to do something for her, and probably also others want to. We can play our music for her, make her feel loved and hugged, and try to help her. For instance, we could put together a compilation and release it on Bandcamp. What do you think?”
We think it’s a great idea, and so does Jenny. Anyone who wants to take part, just send a song to ahugofsongsforjenny@gmail.com (a few Dusted folks may have already contributed).
A new song, a lo-fi version of a song she reviewed, a hugging warm “hi Jenny we love you,” an instrumental tune… you decide.
As for the photo, in many countries people make a wish just before blowing dandelion seeds into the wind. It is a good symbol for what we’re doing here: a lot of artists making the same wish.
Landowner moves at a mad, jittery gallop drum and bass locked in a bumpy one-two cadence, guitar squealing sharply. At speed, you could take this Western Mass band for a modern day version of Bog Shed; in direr, more contemplative modes, they sound a bit like the Shipping News or Black Helicopter.
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Musically, Landowner is taut to the point of breaking, its antic cadences precise and violent with zero daylight between dual guitars (that’s Elliot Hughes and Jeff Gilmartin), rupturing bass (Joshua Owsley, who also sometimes adds a shout or two to the vocals) and very rapid drums (Josh Daniels). To this Dan Shaw adds incantatory vocals, spoken mostly but occasionally fluttering into melody, offering terse commentary on a wide range of topics.
Technology, for instance, in the opening track, also the title cut, which bumps furiously over the potholes as it considers the way that digital platforms limit and control the way we see the world. Says Shaw, “Text prediction/Text prediction/Predictive text/Assume for us/You know what comes next.” Or take climate catastrophe, considered briefly within an agitated tangle of sharp sounds in “Pray for the Environment.” Or incel culture, alluded to briefly and darkly in “Rival Males.” None of these songs are polemics. None move the dialogue forward. Instead, they’re more like sharp, neural yelps in response to distressing stimulus, the words barked out in short segments.
You can tell from the recording that Landowner is a great live band, and, indeed this is an outfit worth seeing if you ever get the opportunity. Catch them on stage if you can, pace jacked up to 11, ominous words made to execute a dance macabre atop a rushing, pounding, skin-tight onslaught of post-punk sound. Or if not, Assumption is a very worthy substitute.
The title Gorgeous Nothings serves fair notice for the unabashed intimacy of its contents. Laura Cetilia is a Los Angeleno cellist and composer whom you might have encountered through her work with the new music chamber ensemble Ordinary Affects, which appears on one of this album’s three pieces. She first came to new music through a high school encounter with Frances-Marie Uitti, and gravitated to the ways and sounds of Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue, Steve Roden and various Wandelweiser composers at the same time that she was playing much straighter repertoire in symphony orchestras. The music she makes now is, in intent if not in sound, a bit like that of Jessica Pavone; she’s doing exactly what she wants to do and doing it in ways that cause no harm.
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The three pieces under consideration all feature a subtle blending of sounds delivered at a fitful, deliberate pace. The first, “Gorgeous Nothing,” combines Cetilia’s softly bowed harmonics with wordless singing. Her cello playing coaxes finely grained, sustained tones into space, where their textures morph and swell as her voice manifests, bends and fades. The effect is quite intimate, as though the listener is sitting behind a screen while the musician plays to herself as the sun comes up. By contrast, “Six Melancholies” feels post-crepuscular. First Cetilia, violinist Morgan Evans-Weiler and vibraphonist J.P.A. Falzone play close harmonies separated by silences and then their voicings split. The music seems to retreat into emptiness, sending back tracking signals like a space probe departing the solar system.
The final piece, “Soil + Stone,” is longer than the other two combined and it stakes out a sound space midway between them. It is performed by n/ether, Cetilia’s duo with fellow cellist Hannah Soren. Their playing is not as delicate as Cetilia’s is on its own, nor do the two voices hover so close to one another. Instead, they slowly bank and wind, their low pitches tracing mostly separate contours that occasionally merge into a patch of complex texture. This results in a music that feels orchestral even though it is the product of just two instruments. Patient and uncluttered, it renders time irrelevant for its duration.
Lande Hekt delivers glossy self-assured power pop in this third album under her own name, following a mid-teens stint in the much more emo-punk Muncie Girls. That earlier band was full of yelps and scratches, the outraged dissonances of put-upon youth, but this one runs very smooth, a jangle like the Bats, but nothing lo-fi about the songs. They’re bright and gem-like, buttressed with confiding harmonies but subsumed in reverie.
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Take, for instance, “A Million Broken Hearts,” all raucous, friction-y punk strumming, battering drums and lyrical guitar leads. It’s a banger, sure, but also quite wistful, Hekt’s cool, unforced voice coasting over the mayhem like a balm. There’s muscle as well as vulnerability in it, as Hekt contemplates disappointing acquaintances and the vagaries of making a living.
Hekt has way of fitting ebullient choruses into her songs, lifting the material out of the quotidian into soaring, euphoric heights. The refrain to “Lucky One” fairly levitates out of the thrum, wheeling through the air like an exotic bird before giving into the verse again.
The best songs come towards the end, charming, contemplative “My Imaginary Friend,” the more forthright, guitar-driven energies of “The Sky” and restless “Submarine” with its swirling, instantly memorable chorus. There is certainly a bit more of foggy, moody, New Zealand here than trip-hoppy Bristol (which is where Hekt is from), but also shades of more current femme forward garage pop like Feeling Figures, Rylie and the Jeanines. In any case, the songs are sweet and sad and full of ambiguities, as good pop always is.
Monolith of Ephemerality is both an overthought, philosophically ponderous phrase and a sort of interesting, paradoxical combination of concepts. Generally speaking, there is nothing ephemeral about a monolith. See the Washington Monument, 170 meters of phallic verticality, or the Obelisk of Theodosius, now standing in Istanbul. The objects’ symbolic power is derived from their stolid massiveness. Music, of course, is a different matter, here and gone as an experience and thus more compatible with the ephemeral’s quicksilver magic. Italian metal band Dwellnought (and these dudes sure have an appetite for portentous English utterances) just about makes the idea of an ephemeral monolith work in this new release, which tends toward long compositions, big riffage and furious rushes of noise.
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Dwellnought works the overlapping spaces among contemporary metal’s primary subgenres, black, death and doom. Likely death doom is the tag most associated with the band; their initial tape, from 2025, featured a single 17-minute track split over the cassette’s two sides, doomily scaled, cavernously (non)produced, replete with grunts and throaty gurgles. Monolith of Ephemerality includes that track, “The Final Desire Is Unbeing,” in a more precise (if not exactly cleaned up) and continuous version. It’s revealing. The song doesn’t drag or otherwise suffer from that physical division. You don’t miss the need to get up, cross the room and flip the tape.
But it’s the somewhat shorter songs (inasmuch as songs just under 10 and 11 minutes constitute “shorter”) that stand out on this LP. This reviewer finds “Ill Whispers” especially toothsome. You can hear the band working out the right textures: the proportion of doom to the black, the measure of death in the doom, and so on. There are thrills aplenty in the tune, but the extended doomy section dominating the middle of the track puts the dread in the proceedings. And the production is just scuzzy and scabrous enough to land the listener down in the dirt, where underground metal belongs. Maybe that monolith is a tombstone.
Department is the one-man project of Australia’s Adam Kyriakou, an exercise in plunderphonics that merges Spector-esque 1960s pop, girl groups, rap, electronics and R&B into dizzying stop-motion rock-and-roll artifacts. In her review in February, Jennifer Kelly called his latest, The Audacity Files“A rich document, this album is never exactly what it sounds like, rather an arch commentary, explication and appreciation of the source material. But where you might expect this meta lens to obscure the actual music, the sounds themselves are so good that you can drift off towards enjoying them per se, without thinking too much about process.” Here’s a multidisciplinary list of the art that has shaped him.
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The Beach Boys — Pet Sounds / Smile Sessions
Pet Sounds is the best album ever made and The Smile Sessions might be the single most influential piece of music on my entire life. Brian Wilson taught me a new way to assemble songs — patchworks that are woven together into a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. He is and forever will be the greatest musical mind to ever exist.
Phil Spector — Back To Mono (1958-1969)
Phil Spector is the greatest record producer ever; I love all of his productions so much. His wall of sound taught me everything in terms of scope, how colossal records should sound, how you shouldn’t be able to hear every single thing a mix. It’s all there in my music. It’s music that feels like the most important thing in the world when it’s playing. It’s uplifting but simultaneously deeply sad. This box set comprises most of my favourite music ever made.
The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time
Sometimes the consensus all time picks are rated that highly for a reason. Like Pet Sounds, Ocarina Of Time deserves every bit of acclaim it’s ever gotten. It taught me what a piece of art is capable of at a very young age. I think for a lot of people around my age some of the first true works of art you’re exposed to are video games. Every feeling I want to capture in my music already exists inside this world, meditations on youth and the passage of time and capturing a world that feels magical and awe inspiring. The soundtrack is also a masterpiece in its own right and was formative for my musical palette. I can tie a lot of my tastes back to this game. My love for baroque instrumentation like harpsichords, choir pads and mellotron esque strings starts here.
Ingmar Bergman — Persona
Film has also been a big influence on how my music dreams and the manner in which I assemble my songs. Persona is one of those films that completely rewired my brain in terms of the possibilities when you untether from linear structure. When your mind isn’t working under such constraints you can achieve so much more. The films of artists like Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, David Lynch and Federico Fellini opened up so many avenues for me creatively.
Ico
Just achingly beautiful. Time stands still when you play this. Big influence on me and the sort of emotion I want my music to evoke. Fumito Ueda has only made three games and every single one of them is special for different reasons. He’s an auteur with a very specific vision that I value deeply.
David Lynch — Twin Peaks: The Return
No hyperbole it’s far and away the best work of art ever televised. The culmination of a lifetime of ideas and creativity. Lynch’s magnum opus. Blew my mind week by week watching it when it aired. I’ve seen it many times in full since and it still gets better every time. To this day I still can’t believe Episode 8 even happened, I’ll remember how these episodes made me think, feel and dream forever. “What year is this?” still haunts me…
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles — “The Tracks Of My Tears”
If not the best song ever written, it’s definitely in the top 3. There’s not one wasted second here, that taught me so much about pop songwriting. There’s so many Motown songs I could have picked, but this is one of those songs that completely stops you in your tracks and then you have to play it fifteen times in a row.
Burial — Tunes 2011-2019
Burial is everything, I’ve spoken about how much Burial changed my life before and I will continue to. His music is so emotionally cathartic, you can’t manufacture that. For me this record contains the most important and vital music made this century. To put it bluntly I could not exist without Burial.
J Dilla — Donuts
J Dilla taught me everything I know about sampling. He was just operating on another level to everyone else. The way I sample and how I sample is definitely informed by his work. Even when it’s subconscious it’s still there in me and will be forever.
Bach — Mass In B Minor (John Eliot Gardiner 1985 Recording)
The most awe-inspiring music you’ll hear. Alongside Brian Wilson, Bach was the closest anyone has come to creating the music of God. “Mass In B Minor” gives me chills every time I hear it.
Chris Forsyth leans into the cool jazz aesthetic of his new ensemble at first, but these long pieces morph, over time, into driving, droning grooves. The trio, What Is Now, is made up of the Philadelphia experimental guitarist plus John Moran and Joey Sullivan, the rhythm section from Bark Culture, a vibraphone-forward cool jazz combo centered around Victor Vieira-Branco.
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This EP under review includes three extended, improvised tracks, jazzier than Forsyth’s typical grooves, but only intermittently. The title cut is loosely put together, with glancing connections between instruments largely pursuing their own ends. The longest of these cuts, it is also the least boxed in by time signature. It stirs to life in a rumble of drums, abstract stabs and slouches of acoustic bass and then furious spurts of agitated bowing. Forsyth’s guitar is high and clear, without the smudges and slides that would align it with his bandmates’ jazz inclinations but also sans the motorik pulse or boogie you expect from Forsyth. Instead, you hear a slush and shuffle of drums, piercing guitar shrieks, and the bass, knotted up in snarls, punching out quick combinations. The guitar gets sharper, louder, more emphatic as the piece goes on, gradually filling up the space so that it sounds more rock and less jazz.
That opening cut is the one with the most give in its joints. “7-11 Red Eye” is, by contrast, battened down and goal-oriented, and even the contemplative “No Name II” adheres to a steady cadence. And yet, there’s something inviting about the fluidity of the jazz bass, the intricacy of the tricky drums, pushing through post-rock propulsion like kudzu. It has always been hard to say whether Chris Forsyth plays rock or blues or drone or boogie. It depends on who’s around and how he feels about things. Here with two veterans of Philly’s jazz scene, he explores grooves that are more open-ended than usual, but bends them over time toward regular, repeating psychedelic grooves.
This piano trio recording was conceived as accompaniment to traditional dances of Mallorca, the Spanish island that is home to pianist Joan Frontera Luna. Luna’s arrangements recast traditional dance tunes as new jazz standards that provide the basis for the choreography of his mother, Catalina Luna Barceló, as part of a larger multimedia project. Fittingly, then, the album’s title, Va de Mescles means something like “it’s a mixture.” The thirteen fairly concise tunes (ranging from around 3 to 6 minutes in length) form a compelling program. The YouTube video of the brief “S’hort d’en Boira”demonstrates the interplay of music and dance.
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Luna is very well supported by drummer Teo Salvà, whose restrained approach recalls the work of Paul Motian, and Pablo Di Salvo, a double bassist who is equally adept with the bow and pizzicato. Like any good jazz piano trio, Ovella Negra — “black sheep” — know how to make the most of space and keep the piano from dominating the other instruments.
On opener “So de pastera,” all of the group’s strengths are on display, as open piano chords are quickly joined by arco bass and sparkling cymbals, and the three musicians then take the traditional tune through its paces, alternating cocktail lounge passages with rollicking crescendos. Di Salvo’s arco work also enlivens “Fandango Menorqui,” “Mateixes” and “Sant Antoni I sa Ximbomba,” starting the latter tune off with a somber drone before a quick tight drum solo brightens the mood. Also adding diversity to the sound, on “La Dama de Mallorca,” Luna trades acoustic piano for Rhodes, and on “Mateixa dels cavallets” he starts with the acoustic and then switches to Rhodes in the middle, adding a bit of fusion muscle.
Dance has been central to jazz since the artform first developed, and Luna and his trio ably carry on this tradition. While it is easy to imagine dancers swirling around while listening to Va de Mescles, the album is also an inspired contribution to the jazz piano trio tradition, in which the Mallorcan source material provides a point of departure for sophisticated harmonies and arrangements. Va de Mescles is available from the label and on streaming services, but, unfortunately, not Bandcamp.
After posting about Dusted mainstay Jennifer Kelly’s cancer diagnosis, we received an email from one of the artists Jenny has reviewed here.
“She gave my records her time and attention," he said, "and she does the same with many, many artists around the world. An authoritative professional gives our music a chance. It means a lot to me, and I believe it means the same to many artists.
I want to do something for her, and probably also others want to. We can play our music for her, make her feel loved and hugged, and try to help her. For instance, we could put together a compilation and release it on Bandcamp. What do you think?”
We think it’s a great idea, and so does Jenny. Anyone who wants to take part, just send a song to ahugofsongsforjenny@gmail.com (a few Dusted folks may have already contributed).
A new song, a lo-fi version of a song she reviewed, a hugging warm “hi Jenny we love you,” an instrumental tune… you decide.
As for the photo, in many countries people make a wish just before blowing dandelion seeds into the wind. It is a good symbol for what we’re doing here: a lot of artists making the same wish.
Like its predecessor Light Verse, Hen’s Teeth sticks to the subtler end of Iron and Wine’saesthetic. Its songs, which came from the same sessions as the previous record, seem stripped back and personal, quiet enough for Sam Beam’s delicate falsetto to find a central place for itself. It is not as mesmeric as the baked, Afro-blues-psychedelia of Shepherd’s Dog (to my ears, still the one to beat), nor as richly, texturally communal as the albums with Calexico. The songs start bare and personal, and if they swell with strings or rollick with muted celebration (as in whirling “In Your Ocean”) they never really escape the quiet, contemplative category.
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Not that this is an entirely bad thing. There are still effortlessly shapely melodies, fitted like skin with perceptive turns of phrase. There are still very lovely arrangements, a little airy this time around, but neither slack nor stuffed nor overly attention hungry. And the musicianship is, as always, excellent. Beam has been doing this for a long time. He knows what it should sound like, and he works with an unending litany of Americana and indie pop players who understand how to make his ideas materialize.
Here the marquee guest is I’m With Her, an alt-folk trio made of up Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins. They appear twice on Hen’s Teeth, first on “Robin’s Egg,” a whipped cream bon bon of breezy vocals and swirling dissolving sonic textures. Later in the sequencing “Wait Up,” is roughed-up a bit more, tousled really, by the twitch of acoustic bass, the clackety-pop of percussion, but also very sleek. The voices have been sanded down, so that, beyond Beam, you can’t make out their individual characteristics; it’s pretty but leaves no mark.
Not so for opener “Roses,” temperate in sonics but studded with poetry so casually delivered that you don’t immediate recognize its sharpness. The oblique theme is lifelong partnership, a relationship as built in and comfortable as Beam’s unassuming songs. “Running to the one you love forever, laughing into each other’s empty mouth,” Beam murmurs, his voice just over a whisper but easily the center of the piece. He sells the long note that finishes the chorus, the volume building but without visible strain, “Hope knows when you hammer on our heart.”
You might want more tension and drama, but for the quiet song full of intelligence and intent, Beam is about as good as it gets.
Michael Pisaro-Liu / Forming — Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation (Sawyer Editions)
This is the second commercially available recording of Michael Pisaro-Liu’s composition Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation. The composer originally devised the score with sonic bricoleurs Haptic in mind, completing it in 2011. While that group realized it in the flesh via live performance, it was the trio of Teodora Stepančić (piano & electronics), Assaf Gidron (electronics & objects), and Martin Lorenz (percussion) who first generated a physical manifestation of the piece. It was that recording, gifted by Pisaro-Liu to Ryan Seward in 2018, that inspired the Colorado-based percussionist to assemble a group with Carl Ritger (electronics, field recordings) and Andrew Weathers (piano, sine tones) to give the composition another breath of life.
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With this piece, Pisaro-Liu conjured a series of rings of increasing size, each hosting a unique sonic element; he envisioned these rings orbiting a nucleus of sine tones. The smaller, innermost loops are the most musical. The rings get noisier as they stray from the center, eventually becoming completely abstract. In his score, the composer has the three players utilize piano, percussion, objects, found sound, and electronics, with live performance and pre-recorded elements melting together in a living, breathing three-dimensional sonic field.
This pattern of concentric rings exists in nature at scales both cosmic and atomic, defining matter, electromagnetic force, and planetary motion. Pisaro-Liu’s complex arrangement of interwoven sonic threads reflects this fundamental notion. Like a scientist, he seeks to understand the world around him — its synchronicities, periodicities, and fundamental rules — and how he fits within it.
The timing of the score is precise, an hour broken up into equal segments, but Pisaro-Liu encourages the players to mix themselves into the structure, introducing a sense of variability and personality to the piece. In a 2009 essay called “Wandelweiser,” in which he describes the formation and impetus behind the composer/performer collective (of which he’s an integral part), Pisaro-Liu describes his desire to collaborate with his performers: “I wanted to stop telling musicians what to do in every detail and to start creating possibilities for performers to explore a particular, individual sense of sound within a simple clear structure I would provide.” As listeners, we are also collaborators, albeit unintended. The composition and its realization both drive our focus and arousal.
Comparing the two recordings of Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation, one clearly hears the players’ selves living inside the sonic space. Forming (Seward, Ritger, and Weathers) choose to highlight the spikier, noisier, and more unconventional elements. Bowed and amplified percussion, electronics and field recordings rattle and buzz over the much quieter piano and sine waves. On their recording, Stepančić, Gidron, and Lorenz homed in on the piano/sine interactions, pushing the noise to the background. Both are fascinating realizations of Pisaro-Liu’s intent, but Forming proves to be the more texturally adventurous trio, amplifying the nooks and crannies of the abstract and living at the outer fringes of sound’s possibilities.
Here’s part two of our monthly run-down of short reviews.
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Buck Meek — The Mirror (4AD)
The Mirror is Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek’s second album for 4AD, and his fourth overall. Arriving on the back of the sixth Big Thief album, last year’s disappointing Double Infinity, Meek has brought bandmate James Krivchenia on board as producer. As a result, The Mirror sounds fantastic, and all of the playing among Meek’s bandmates is fluid and dynamic, smouldering with inspiration and the conviviality of a free-flowing jam session among close friends. It’s also great to hear Meek firing off some of his characteristically idiosyncratic guitar solos. Musically there’s a lot to love. The downside of The Mirror is the same issue that hampered Meek’s last album, Haunted Mountain — sappy lyrics, such as “Making words up while we made love” on lead single and opening track “Gasoline,” or “I’ve seen angels fly every night above our bed” on “Ring of Fire.” Though these lyrical misfires don’t completely sour the experience, they do cast doubt on Meek’s creative acuity.
Tim Clarke
Microplastique — Many Roads (Irritable Mystic)
Many Roads is, as you might suppose from its title, a document of a tour. But it’s not a Jackson Browne/Bob Seger reproduction of mirror gazing; the focus is on the music, not its makers. During the summer of 2025 the Chicago-based quartet, which is led by percussion and composer Adam Shead, played 15 dates around the Midwest. The album is drawn from six of them. It’s a rare thing for an improvisation-oriented combo on the bottom end of the food chain to get that many gigs in a short period of time. The charge of getting deeper into the music together enhances its pre-existing playfulness, which one can hear on the album they released a year ago. On Many Roads, their flute-forward, percussion-dense music evokes Afro-conscious ensembles from back in the day (Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry,) and merges it with toy piano-prizing new music and the sort of circus sounds you might hear in some Fellini movie. They combine it all with a sense of restraint that attests to the group’s shared sense of purpose.
Bill Meyer
Monkious — Straight With Chaser (JACC)
Canon meets unbridled invention on Straight With Chaser. The Monkious is a 2/3 Portuguese, 1/3 German trio that includes drummer Philipp Ernsting, double bassist Gonçalo Almeida and electric guitarist Marcelo Dos Reis. Their method is implied by the album title and explicated in the credits. Basically, they play Monk’s tunes off the cliff into open air and then, like denizens of a Loony Tunes cartoon, skedaddle on suddenly too fast to see limbs until they alight once more upon a familiar outcropping of Monk. Dos Reis handles both the melodic declarations and the blurriest rushes and he owes the other two musicians thanks for their diligent efforts keep him from suffering Wile E. Coyote’s fate. Almeida is the guy who always keeps ahold of that one tree branch sticking out from the rock’s face and extends a strong grip that yanks the guitarist back onto land. Ernsting, on the other hand, seems to flex open space itself, bending the very air so that Dos Reis can slip off of its contours. Yeah, this is a fun one.
The bassoon gets a bad rap in popular culture, associated with cartoon sobs and laugh tracks in a rom-com, but make no mistake: in the right hands, the instrument is anything but the soundtrack’s sidekick. Vivaldi knew it and wrote dozens of concertos for bassoon, and Stravinsky starts The Rite of Spring with a strangled cry in the instrument’s upper register. In From the Soul, bassoonist Frank Morelli leans into legato, smoothly navigating recent contemporary classical compositions. Joined by pianist Wei-Yi Yang on Jeff Scott’s “Elegy for Innocence,” he plays both quicksilver runs and impassioned melodies with impressive control, the finale building to a sequence of virtuoso turns that glisten with intensity. Bassoon and solo voice is a rare combination, but Lori Laitman’s “I Never Saw Another Butterfly”suggests it can be a good one. Janna Baty sings with a rich sound that balances well with Morelli’s tone. A transcription of an aria by Dominic Argento reminds one that bassoonists routinely deal with adapted works. Wynton Marsalis’s “Meeiaan” features the Callisto String Quartet in a piece embodied with the composer’s interest in early jazz and blues. There is a playful cast to much of the music here, but the performance is earnest in a way that no soundtrack cliché ever approaches. The recording finishes with another bassoon and piano piece, “Prayer,”by Nirmali Fenn, in which the writing is more dissonant and Morelli is given the opportunity to display some of the extended techniques at the instrument’s disposal. Hearing both ends of the spectrum, the Fenn following the Marsalis piece, underscores the bassoon’s capacity, especially in the hands of a player like Morelli, to contain multitudes.
Christian Carey
PlainsPeak — Someone To Someone (Irrabagast)
Let’s make this plain from the outset — PlainsPeak is a band of Midwestern-located musicians led by saxophone generalist (although he sticks to alto here) Jon Irabagon. As is often the case with players who teach at the university level, he’s moved around a bit, and most recently has been in Chicago. Irabagon’s accompanists on Someone To Someone are mostly associated with the Calligram label. They have all made a commitment to gig steadily and are comfortable diverging from mainstream jazz fundamentals. That translates into music that never lets go of a swinging foundation and operates comfortably within defined, song-related structures (some titled with Chicago-centric humor), but finds within these frameworks many opportunities to wax creatively deft and expressive. Particularly impressive are the moments when trumpeter Chuck Johnson and Irabagon jointly engage in simultaneous soloing over rhythms that surge like a Lake Michigan swells on a stormy day.
Bill Meyer
Ned Rothenberg — Looms & Legends (Pyroclastic)
Regardless of the diversities imposed by genre and individual intention, every solo performance of conviction sends one common message; this music is complete. Reeds player Ned Rothenberg delivers the whole shebang on his first solo record in a dozen years. Across its fourteen tracks he plays alto saxophone, shakuhachi, and Bb and A clarinets, wielding each with a technical assurance so strong that it’s easy to overlook. You’re likely to notice other things first, like the open-ended logic of “How You Slice It,” on which a pondering clarinet melody gives way to an unbroken, circular-breathing-powered perambulation that invests high-pitched multiphonics and adroit redirections with emotional heft. Or there’s the titrated celebration conveyed by the intervallic leaps on the ultra-compact “Brief Tall Tale.” The record ends with a version of “’Round Midnight” played on shakuhachi, which might sound like a novelty gambit, but actually sounds authentically felt and true.
Bill Meyer
Alan Sparhawk — Alan Sparhawk Solo Band (Sub Pop)
Anybody seeing Alan Sparhawk play live last year would have heard most of his two recent LPs, White Roses, My Godand Alan Sparhawk With Trampled By Turtles, as well as a range of material from older projects and even a cover or two. Now, using the same kind of naming convention as his last album (and giving shine to his band on that tour, his son Cyrus on bass and Eric Pollard on drums), he rounds up two of the newest tracks they played. There’s a pretty sharp distinction between the A and B sides, but both are responding to the current state of the world. “JCMF” has an incandescent rage that hearkens back to “Pretty People” from Low’s 2007 Drums and Guns, except louder. The set-ending, David Lynch-inspired “No More Darkness,” in contrast, is almost a lullaby.
Ian Mathers
Greg Weeks — If the Sun Dies (Language of Stone)
Greg Weeks is perhaps best known for playing alongside Dusted favorite Meg Baird in the psych-folk collective Espers. Released on his own Language of Stone label, If the Sun Dies is Weeks’ fifth solo album — and it’s an absolute cracker. Steeped in reflective melancholy, these 11 songs strike a consistent tone that allows one track to bleed into another seamlessly, especially going from “The Heathen Heart” into “A Narrow Star” during the album’s first half. The core instruments of Weeks’ acoustic guitar and voice, plus Jess Sparhawk on bass and Ben McConnell on drums, map out a slowly unfurling, misty terrain. At times the music sounds like it’s going to collapse completely, especially on “Tail Lights Burn the Hillside Red,” where each player is almost challenging the others to play even slower. Indeed, if the guitars were distorted, the album could almost be doom-metal, or at the very least slowcore. Counterbalancing the suffocating weight there’s some lovely psychedelic flourishes on Mellotron, fuzz guitar and organ, and on the slightly more upbeat songs, such as the title track and “Gone Darkside,” there’s a perceptible spring in the band’s step. Not surprising when the core songwriting and commitment to tone are so impressive and affecting.
Tim Clarke
Susumu Yokota — The Boy and the Tree (Skintone Records/Lo Recordings)
The latest entry in the Susumu Yokota reissue campaign, The Boy and the Tree couldn’t be more different from its predecessor, Will. In his Dusted review, Ian Mathers highlighted Will’s “joyful sense of playfulness.” That album’s firm grounding in danceable, jazzy house music makes it distinct from The Boy and the Tree’s icy, unsettling restraint. Supposedly inspired by a visit to Japanese world heritage site Yakushima Island and the anime movie Princess Mononoke, the musical elements featured here, such as woody and metallic percussion, and vocal and guitar snippets, are handled in such a clinical manner that the overall effect ends up unnerving and faintly sinister. The instrumental ingredients are deployed sparingly but repeated through digital delay, like specimens trapped under microscope slides. Titles such as “Fairy Link” and “Secret Garden” suggest wandering through a benign enchanted environment, but “Plateau on Plateau” and “Blood on Snow” offer clues that the atmosphere of these tracks is more than meets the ear… The Boy and the Tree is a hall of mirrors to lose yourself in — misleadingly simple but disarmingly uncanny.
February always seems interminable and between unceasing storms of both weather and political malfeasance, this year is no exception. But the Dusted crew managed to find some solace digging out from their piles of music, for our monthly collection of short reviews. This time out, the music ranges from Russian metal to explorations of just intonation to dream pop to solo reed improvisations to extrapolations of Monk to compositions for bassoon to psych-folk with all manner of stops in between. With so many reviews, we had to split this one in to two parts. Contributors for this round include Christian Carey, Tim Clarke, Bryon Hayes, Jennifer Kelly, Ian Mathers, Bill Meyer and Jonathan Shaw.
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Brahmashiras — Trinitite (Caligari)
This new LP from Russian miscreants Brahmashiras puts real pressure on the adequacy of several subgenre tags the underground uses to label (and, thereby, at least implicitly to value) disparate musics. Metalpunk? Black metal? Blackened punk? Even — ugh — blackened crust? None feels accurate or sufficient to the intensity, nastiness and tangible rage radiating through the songs on Trinitite. Likely it’s better to play the record and let the tunes speak for themselves. One assumes the shrieked and shouted lyrics are in Russian, so some of us will have a hard time understanding what’s spoken, or howled, or moaned. But there’s nothing mysterious about the furious furrow the riffs in “Exodus” will carve through your brain, or the crusty high drama that blazes through “Forty Minutes.”
Jonathan Shaw
Citrinitas — Unending Descent (Caligari)
“Outsider black metal”? That’s what some folks are terming the music of Citrinitas, a mysterious Oulu-based project. Seems to this reviewer that all underground black metal seeks an outside — outside conventional culture; outside traditional concepts of pleasure and moral right; outside mainstream commercial activity (well, this last one is sort of tough to argue if you have a Bandcamp page, but fair enough, Unending Descent isn’t being handled by Sony Music-owned Century Media…). Even given those assumptions and attitudes, it’s possible to note the profound weirdness of Citrinitas’ music, which is inbent, blurred and full of disturbing eddies and semi-human emanations of noise. One imagines that the consciousness responsible for the music must also be inbent, blurry and disturbed. Outsider? Unending Descent is certainly only semi-listenable, in all the best senses of that term. More, please.
Jonathan Shaw
Werner Durand & John Krausbauer — Black Seraphim (Moving Furniture)
Werner Durand and John Krausbauer are both explorers of just intonation, probing the spaces between the semitones found in the Western musical tradition. Durand builds his own wind instruments to explore alternative scales, while Krausbauer deploys his violin. Black Seraphim is their debut collaboration, a nearly 30-minute-long drone workout that winds the upper and lower registers together with searing passion. Krausbauer’s bowing is slow but aggressive, his violin howling as if spirits are trapped inside and seeking to escape. Durand unleashes a highly textured bass drawl with hurricane force. As the two energies meet, a third voice reveals itself: a fiery demon that dances with a sinister cadence. Its whirling flame blazes with a forceful roar, joyful in its uncanny gallop. This relentless intensity is captivating, a delightful resonance for us to behold.
Bryon Hayes
Figure Eight — “until the sun swallows the earth” b/w “hummingbird” (self-release)
Figure Eight drifts at the softer, more diffuse end of the dream-pop-into-shoegaze spectrum, layering massive, shimmering auras of guitar onto tetchier, growling bass. The singer, Abby Goeser, sings with piercing clarity but blunted edges, floating down the descants like a feather wafting downward. Her partner, Nash Rood, injects this seraphic sound with strife and friction, a muted tsunami of noise always looming but never obliterating. The pair of them mostly encompass this Oakland band, but they’ve brought on a drummer, too, another engine and throughline for this diaphanous music. Put it on and fall backwards into something very, very soft.
Jennifer Kelly
Geologist — Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? (Drag City)
For his debut solo record, Animal Collective member Brian Weitz wields hurdy gurdy drones that grow into fractalized melodies. His frequent muse, the arid plain of the Sonoran Desert, continues to inspire him, encouraging a warm yet muted color palette for these songs, which range from psych rock bangers to motorik soundscapes to near-ambient drone feasts. Weitz doesn’t go it alone: he’s enlisted a number of compatriots to assist. Three drummers (Emma Garau, Ryan Oslance, and Alianna Kalaba provide the propulsion, while Shane McCord, Mikey Powers, and Adam Lion bring clarinet, cello, and vibraphone ornamentation to his kaleidoscopic tunes. Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? is quite the serpentine journey, taking us to a variety of locales, yet it’s sinuous and supple, a testament to Weitz’ songcraft. He sparkles and shimmers with his Animal Collective pals, but he’s equally inventive on his own.
Bryon Hayes
Danny Kamins — Pracownia Wschodnia/The Creamery (Musical Eschatology)
Houston-based sopranino and baritone saxophonist Danny Kamins ponders the improvisational continuum and its spatial circumstances on this solo recording. Half of the music comes from a concert in Arkansas, on which Kamins limited himself to the smaller horn and the rest from an earlier concert in Poland. Both feature the echoing acoustics of the spaces in which they were played as transformative influences, hitting that perfect spot where an instrument no longer sounds quite like itself, but where the tones are still perceivable and unobstructed. Likewise, each works a fundamental tune of yore (“Body And Soul” in Arkansas, Coltrane’s “Living Space” in Poland) into a journey through each horn’s personal potentialities. When Kamins starts circular breathing, his output takes a slow corkscrew trip into an altered state that feels quite rewarding to access.
In parallel to her work with Stella Kola, Pigeons, and the Weeping Bong Band, this multi-instrumentalist maintains a solitary pursuit of contoured sound. Atrium is a double LP (or CD, if you’re a more frugal materialist) of manageably dimensioned reclines into soft texture and evocative shape. On the majority of the album’s eleven tracks, long, curving tones from reverb-plumped woodwinds unfurl in slow motion, often layered atop each other in a more-is-more equation; the soprano sax-forward pieces are a little too soft focus, but the denser pieces are imbued with grave stateliness. Spare bass guitar notes pulse and decay like beneficent radiation on “Skyline I,” and when Knudsen switches to piano on “Many A Happy Hour,” the music empties out so that only the outlines remain, like the framework of a wooden house to be.
Bill Meyer
Raymond MacDonald — Desire Lines No 2: The Gathering Of The MacDonalds (HYG)
Pibroch is a traditional form of Scottish bagpipe music that floats complex melodic variations of a theme over a long drone. Raymond MacDonald isn’t the first to point out the similarity between pibroch and the output of saxophonists who use circular breathing to support long flows of intricate fingering, but he might be the first to take the tradition head-on. This album comprises three tilts at the titular tune, which apparently contains enough melodic information to set the alto saxophonist on three fairly distinct courses of unbroken line-twirling. It’s absorbing stuff, but the album art contains explicit acknowledgment that not all MacDonalds are drawn to it; the sleeve’s gatefold reproduces an increasingly inchoate text of protest by his daughter, who objected IN ALL CAPS to him practicing this material at breakfast time.
Bill Meyer
Christian Marien Quartett — Beyond The Fingertips (MarMade)
This record is all about band interaction over the duration of a set, so let’s acknowledge the participants up front. Drummer Christian Marien, the quartet’s leader and composer, is joined by electric guitarist Jasper Stadhouders, double bassist Antonion Borghini, and Tobias Delius on tenor saxophone and clarinet. Astute readers may already be disconnecting from this review in order to hear some new Delius, and if you are one of them, I can’t fault your attention management strategy; he’s in great form here, as are his fellows. Marien’s tunes tap into the participants’ fluent negotiations of the zones where jazz and related musical methods converge; you’ll hear elements of South African folk and Caribbean dances alongside harmolodic rhythmic turbulence and blues-steeped melodies. But his decision to present each side (there’s a vinyl edition, and its divisions are reproduced in digital formats) as a continuous performance places said sturdy compositions within a larger dynamic process in which the transitions between tunes and emotional tones is as important as the tunes themselves. Don’t hang on, just enjoy the ride.
Hen Ogledd (Welsh for “The Old North”) initially began around 10 years ago as a collaboration between acclaimed songwriter Richard Dawson and experimental harpist Rhodri Davies, but the line-up has since expanded to include Sally Pilkington and Dawn Bothwell. DISCOMBOBULATED is their third album as a quartet and, as the all-caps title suggests, it conveys the confusion and frustration of living in a 21st-century reality that conspires against the reassuring normalities of everyday life. Hen Ogledd meets this challenge with humor, defiance, and playfulness, resulting in music that’s colorful, chaotic, and occasionally deeply moving.
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The album’s 50-minute runtime is dominated by the 20-minute epic “Clear Pools.” Though the track opens with a flurry of free-jazz drumming, it soon settles into a languid loop of phased chords. Vocals and saxophone take their turn to unfurl atop this unchanging flow, creating a deep and reflective space — a marked contrast in tempo with the rest of the album. Along the way, voices male and female unite, singing lyrics in both English and Welsh. For example, there’s a minute-long vocal interlude “Amser a Ddengys” (Welsh for “Time Will Tell”), a charming introductory child’s story (“Nell’s Prologue”), plus some atmospherically intoned spoken word.
“Scales Will Fall” is the towering anthem of the album’s first half, initially led by synth horns and Dawn Bothwell’s impassioned spoke/sung vocals, culminating in a rallying chorus of “Fool’s gold! / Scales will fall and the fire in your soul lives on!” At the song’s halfway point the tempo eases and the synth horns are replaced by some expressive soloing on trumpet. Then, once the chorus melody returns it’s positively ecstatic.
Dawson takes the lead on the chorus of the evocatively bleak “Dead in a Post-truth World,” while “End of the Rhythm” is driven by an addictively rubbery bassline. Though the individual elements of the songs aren’t necessarily original, it’s their inspired recombination and passionate presentation that makes DISCOMBOBULATED such a compelling record.
Jackie West has a feathery soft voice, the kind of instrument that might not wake you up fully if you heard it in your while asleep but rather inclines to infiltrate your dreams. This second full-length, the second also to be released on her husband Dan Kniskowy’s Ruination record, makes an impact without excessive volume or drama. It sheathes cool-toned melodies in delicate layers of vocal and instrumental sound.
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West says she wrote and recorded Silent Century as a mostly solitary effort, one that allowed her to examine and incorporate the dialogues that played out in her head. It is populated by many voices, then, but also the same voice, or perhaps the same person in many different ways. Thus, the heady country holler of “Overlooking Glass” with its mountain lilt and massed guitar is a bit more rustic than the chic, suave title cut, but you can see the connection. Even the blistered, amp-fried “Thunder Ideal,” which starts in howl like Bardo Pond or Sonic Youth, slips soon after into more placid channels, with swirling vocals and clouds of ambient sound.
Reviewing Close to the Mystery in 2024, you can sense a suppressed longing for noise and friction. I wrote, ““West has been quite rightly compared to Julee Cruise, the narcotic chanteuse who barely breathed the Twin Peaks theme in the 1990s…Still, the songs become more memorable as they pick up weight and density.” Yet here, with a good bit more sonic variation, the supple melodies, the caressing tones take precedence, even when the music gets louder. You can admire the echoey, gospel-bluesy guitar licks of “New Moon,” for instance, but it’s the liquid simplicity of the song itself that makes the case.
As before, West has marshalled a very capable band. Knishkowy, who records as Adeline Hotel, on guitar, Sean “Moon” Mullins and Nico Osborne make up the core ensemble, while Katie Von Schleicher and Nate Mendelsohn engineered and mixed the record.
Silent Century is still a quiet record, and you’ll have to spend some time with it to really get the gist. But it’s not pale or thin or unexplored as many stripped bare albums are, and if you look at them long enough, the depth and plushness of the arrangements come through. West may never spend much time jumping off amps or shrieking into mics, but she is not as unobtrusive as she first appears.
Chad Taylor Quintet — Smoke Shifter (Otherly Love)
For his sixth album as a leader, Chad Taylor’s put together a band that doesn’t stray too far from the tradition and over six songs makes an album that doesn’t push any envelopes, but is a nice slice on contemporary jazz that may have slipped past your radar when it came out late last year.
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Smoke Shifter features a band of Taylor on drums, Matt Engle on bass, Bryan Rogers on tenor sax, Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, and as a nice wrinkle, Victor Vieira-Branco on vibraphone. They’re largely Philly based musicians with a foot in more experimental music; Taylor and Finlayson have appeared on several of Mary Halvorson’s albums, while Viera-Branco might be best known for his work with Bark Culture. But here they largely keep things from getting too outside: Smoke Shifter is a record that wears its early 60s hard bop influences on its sleeve and never gets too far outside.
It opens with “Broken Horse,” a piece written by Rogers and one that gives the two horns plenty of room to move around. They play complimentary lines over a brisk tempo, occasionally in unison but sometimes moving around each other. The rhythm section gives each of them space to solo, and while neither Rogers nor Finlayson take any chances with their solos, there’s a nice transition between each’s solo where they play at the same time, each riffing off each other’s ideas and occasionally hitting on the same notes. It’s a pretty cool section and you wish for more of this interplay between the two.
Taylor contributes two songs here. The first is “Waltz for Megan” which closes side one. It’s a bit of a feature for his drumming in the way it mixes tempos, has the two horns all but layered on top of each other and gives him plenty of room for quick fills between beats. It also gives Engle ample space to stretch out on a solo before Rogers comes in with his own which drips with a smoky, late-night vibe.
The second of Taylor’s pieces is “Smoke Shifter,” a nice hard bop tune with a spiky theme where the two horns seem to pop out of each other’s notes, like they’re playing lines just a beat apart. They weave through it nicely and the piece opens up for Rogers and Finlayson to step up for their solos. On a second listen however, you notice Taylor’s drumming here: he’s propulsive, mixing quick runs and driving crashes at his kit, almost in conversation with them as he keeps the music driving forward, but never overwhelms. It’s remarkably tasteful playing on his part.
But Vieira-Branco gets the last word on the record, with two of his pieces closing it out. Both of them show him as a composer with an ear for moody, almost swirling pieces that remind me of Gary Burton’s 1970s records. The first is “October 26,” where his vibes carry the melody and the two horns play in counterpart to each other, a nice piece that feels more like a group composition than a series of solos. And the record ends with his “Paradise Lawns/October 29th” a sandwich of two themes that let him play against Taylor’s crashing drums and Engle’s pulsing bass, with a lengthy Taylor solo in between.
Smoke Shifter doesn’t break new ground for these players, but it’s hardly a record that’s slumming either. It’s a good hard bop record with some dynamic playing, particularly from Taylor and Finlayson. It’s one that was easily lost in the shuffle last year, but is worth checking out.
There’s an undertone of disappointment in Heavenly’s happy, peppy, tootling power pop, a sense of vulnerability and ache even in the bubbliest cuts. “Excuse Me,” an early single, is about as affirming and positive as garage pop can get, with bashing drums and ecstatic bursts of guitar strumming, but it centers around the wistful lyric “Excuse me, I thought you were someone else/they’ve been on my mind.”
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This is the fifth album from the Oxford twee-pop mainstays, a band that formed out of the remnants of C86 outfit Talulah Gosh, around songwriter Amelia Fletcher, her brother Matthew on drums, Peter Momtchiloff, Cathy Rogers on keyboards and Rob Pursley on bass. Heavenly’s main run happened in the early to mid-1990s, the first three albums on much loved Sarah Records, the final one, Operation Heavenly, on Willja. Those associations link Heavenly firmly with the early 1990s twee pop scene, but they had punk inclinations as well (as demonstrated by the 1995 Punk Girl EP) and were friendly with the riot grrrl set, including members of Bratmobile, Huggy Bear and Sleater-Kinney. That first era ended when Matthew Fletcher took his own life (Ian Button plays drums here), and, unable to continue with Heavenly, Amelia Fletcher formed a series of bands with her partner Rob Pursley, including Marine Research, Tender Trap and the Catenary Wires.
It’s not clear exactly what inspired Fletcher et. al. to resurrect the Heavenly name, but we can all be glad they did. Here’s an album that gets at the balance between pure, raucous, positive punk energy and the elegiac textures of lush, baroque pop. You can hear bits of the New Pornographers in the cheery swirls of harmonies, of 1960s girl pop in the organ wheezing organ, and even shreds of confessional vulnerability amidst the jaunty mayhem of soft garage pop.
The opener, “Scene Stealing,” for instance, comes to life with the title phrase in dizzy, buzzy harmonies. Everything is as sweet and chewy as nougat on the outside but braced at the edges with a hard-won realism. “We never lose, we never lose ourselves/we never lose until we do,” croons Fletcher, the brightness of her melody tinged with some of that loss.
Everyone involved is in fine form, but Cathy Rogers, the keyboardist, may well be the band’s secret weapon, pushing the sound forward with jaunty, music hall rhythms, filling the gaps with 1960s redolent drones, putting up a cheerful front that you don’t quite buy into. In any case, it’s a treat to hear Heavenly’s smart, rough-edged, utterly intoxicating tunes again, nearly 30 years after they stopped.
Since the sublime one-two punch of Apocalypse (2011) and Dream River (2013), Bill Callahan’s music has — at least to this reviewer’s ears — declined in force and interest. While recourse to an artist’s biography is a dubious critical maneuver, it’s possible to claim that shifts in the governing feeling tone of Callahan’s music can be indexed to changes in the songwriter’s life. He has seemed more settled, happier, even. Married. Kids he clearly loves. Those changes are increasingly present in the songs. Note, for instance, an exemplary shift from the volatile ambiguities of “Ride My Arrow” (2013) to the relative soppiness of “First Bird” (2022). The avian images are there, as ever with Callahan, but the songs move from the anxious symbols of the first song to the stable, sweet metaphors of the second.
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Some specifics will help. In “Ride My Arrow,” Callahan sings, “The eagle flies, using the river as a map / A small animal in it clasp / Alive, and enjoying the ride.” The eagle, the excitements of flight — these are persistent figures in Callahan’s lyric repertoire. But who is “enjoying the ride?” The qualifier “alive” suggests it’s the “small animal,” held in the predator’s talons. Doomed, but still finding pleasure. It’s playful, thrilling. Just down the line, in “First Bird” Callahan presents us with a markedly different set of figures, focused on a different “clasp”: “Shadow of my boy coming down the hall / And little sister’s hand is deep in his palm / And her feet don’t ever touch the ground / Cuz everybody wants to carry her around.” The initial hint of darkness (“Shadow of my boy”) is quickly dispelled by the warmth of the kid’s care for “little sister.” Her small form is carried aloft, but it’s safe, nurturing. “Ride My Arrow” moves with pranksome energy, unsettled; “First Bird” is all predictable, assuring patterns.
It’s not constructive to entertain romanticized notions of suffering and creativity of the kind that find their irritating complements on the silliest emo records, or in the recent music of Nick Cave. And it might overstate to argue that My Days of 58, Callahan’s new LP, is a return to the sustained unease expressed on a record like Apocalypse, for this listener the highwater mark in the singer’s career. But the new record is a good distance from the sentiments and sentimentality of Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest (2019), which bordered here and there on cloying. A passage from “The Man I’m Supposed to Be,” the first single from the new LP, suggests a change in tone: “I’ve been living too long in my head / Not loving you enough in our bed / From now on, I start living my life as if the next day I’ll be dead;” then, in a quintessentially Callahan phrasing, he repeats, “The next day I’ll be dead,” in a tone that’s either ironical or alarmed. It’s impossible to know which.
The song couples its whiplash turns from naked confession to inscrutable evasion to a taut arrangement. It doesn’t quite rock, but it skitters and occasionally howls and thumps; Jim White’s intuitive percussion is particularly effective. The song is disquieting, then jarring. “The World Is Still,” the record’s final track, pursues a different tack, contrasting Callahan’s measured baritone, intoning lines like “And nothing has changed / And nothing ever will,” with keening, dissonant woodwinds. The voice seeks stillness; the music refuses it. Both songs open spaces animated by tension, unease.
To plumb the tension, we might contrast two additional songs, “The Sing” from Dream River and “Why Do Men Sing” from the new LP. “The Sing” is a very fine song from an excellent record. Beginning with its lyric speaker very much alone at a “hotel bar” (“The only words I’ve said today / Are ‘beer’ and ‘thank you’ / ‘Beer’ / ‘Thank you’ / ‘Beer’ / ‘Thank you’”), the song examines a number of scenarios through which the speaker imagines himself less alone, perhaps even intimately joined to another presence. The most adequate of those imaginary scenarios is the last; Callahan sings, “Till the wind finds something to ping / Or the pinging thing finds the wind / We’re all looking for a body / Or a means to make one sing.” That’s gorgeous, and sort of an inventory of essentials of music.
More significant, in those lines you can hear Dream River anticipating its celebrations of love, of the body found and launched into song: “Small Plane” and “Winter Road.” Those are songs of joy and contentment; even the “dangerous,” snow-covered asphalt of “Winter Road” can only be the conveyance home, to the beloved. Song is similarly clear and evident, there to be sung to the woman who represents purpose and meaning. “Why Do Men Sing,” which may be the best song on My Days of 58, presents a songwriter who has mislaid those home truths, lost on distant highways and in emotionally desolate interiors.
The song acquires significant cred by conjuring Lou Reed as a dream avatar for songwriting excellence. But in the context of “Why Do Men Sing,” even Reed’s phantom presence can only offer a “warm handshake” and bare homily: “It’s cool, baby, just got to let it ride.” There are no absolute truths. The singer still finds himself out on the road, to “eat my dinner cold / On a couch, vile and old / In a very green room.” The nauseous images rail against the romance of the touring life. You might “let it ride,” but that’s no assurance of contentment or happiness. So why do men sing? Callahan can give us no answers. But some of us find the struggle, the ride, much more interesting when the answers are lacking.
Marty Ehrlich first encountered Julius Hemphill in the early 1970s when he was a high school student in St. Louis. Though Ehrlich performed and recorded with BAG (Black Artists’ Group), a community-based collective co-founded by Hemphill in 1968 to foster collaboration and present music, dance, theater, visual arts and creative writing, he didn’t get to know him well until the two were living in New York in the late 1970s. Ehrlich went on to collaborate with Hemphill, particularly as a member of Hemphill’s saxophone sextet, becoming musical director after the leader died in 1995. As chief researcher for Hemphill’s archive, Ehrlich has continued to unearth a trove of previously unreleased recordings, many documented on the invaluable boxed set The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony. With Circle the Heart, Relative Pitch Records presents another find, a live recording from Worcester, MA from 1982 which was the only time that the two would perform as a duo.
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The hour-long set is comprised of six extended improvisations with five of the pieces by Ehrlich and only one by Hemphill. The recording kicks off with “Tribute,” with the two reeds patiently shadowing each other across the slow, sinuous theme. The piece flows with probing, free, abstract lyricism as the two pass phrases back and forth. Half way through, Ehrlich switches to flute, countering Hemphill’s warm, trenchant alto as the two alternate between solo statements and twinned interchange. Ehrlich switches back to soprano for the final section, mining the ruminative underpinnings of the piece. The two introduce “Pliant Plaint” with hissing breath and reed squeaks, methodically assembling fluttered fragments into a swarming dialogue. Their lines flit around each other, synch in and then arc off with fiery, lithe acuity.
Ehrlich wrote a series of pieces based on Willie Whipporwill, a character from a play by BAG member Malinka Elliott. The duo seize the anthemic theme of “Willie Whipporwill Heads Back Home,” weaving phrases together leading to a gamboling, blues-tinged soprano solo by Hemphill, ending with a boisterous duo stomp. “Circle the Heart” is a muted bass clarinet and flute exploration which the two navigate with steadfast, free lyricism. The 14 minute “All Told Alto Blues” is a highlight of the release as the two pull the theme apart with tandem buoyant fervor. They toss lines back and forth with animated abandon reminiscent of the areas Hemphill was exploring with the World Saxophone Quartet at the time. The set ends with Hemphill’s “Border Town,” a tune he recorded with both WSQ and the Julius Hemphill Big Band. Here, Ehrlich’s pliant bass clarinet provides a nimble anchor for Hemphill’s spry soprano extrapolations. Circle the Heartunearths an exhilarating performance by the duo, adding a notable addition to both musicians’ discographies.
Various Artists — Music From The Mountain People Of Central Vietnam (Sublime Frequencies)
One reason that traditional music is recorded in the field is that someone has a notion that the sounds of the past are disappearing. The concern is real; human folkways stand as much chance of surviving encounters with the modern world unscathed as did England’s prehistoric forests. But no matter when the sound collecting is done, it captures not just the past, but the present. This is the case with Music From The Mountain People Of Central Vietnam. It’s made up of recordings that Vincenzo Della Ratta made in three highland provinces of Vietnam between 2007 and 2023. These are years in which old ways have coexisted with modernization, and an astute ethnomusicologist or student of minority Vietnamese languages would be able locate the friction between the two in the presence of acoustic guitars and old tunes fitted with newer lyrics, including one about “the American war” (as folks in that neck of the woods call what US residents call the Vietnam war).
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But while the rate of change and destruction of antique sounds has likely accelerated, the transformative processes aren’t exactly new. Every person who ever learned a song orally has had the opportunity to change it, after all. One could also approach this music from another angle; it’s just what Ratta had the opportunity and motivation to collect. And that’s where Sublime Frequencies comes in. The label’s been circulating personal perspectives on locations far from the USA and Europe since 2003, starting with a compilation of songs culled from cassettes that Alan Bishop (Sublime Frequencies co-founder and singer for the Sun City Girls, Dwarfs of East Agouza, etc.) picked up in Sumatra in 1989. The LP under consideration is just one more in a long line of records that share with the world what some obsessive far from home heard and knew in their heart was the real good shit.
Given this writer’s limited acquaintance with Vietnamese music, you should not take the rest of this review as a deeply informed response, but rather one informed by a few other records. That said, its contents are an intriguing and pleasant surprise. You won’t hear any wild and wiggy licks on a dan bau (a monochord that, in the right hands, sounds like the missing link between the delta blues and Henry Kaiser), nor sophisticated court music ensembles. Instead, there’s a lot of music made on instruments — spike fiddles, tube zithers, jaw harps, bamboo xylophones — that reflect the limited resources of people living up in the hills and away from the big cities. Some of it sounds superficially familiar on account of the non-virtuoso technique of the players, who are more interested in strumming or beating out a good tune than they are in flexing instrumental muscle. And some of it’s just similar; no matter where you’re from, if you have the facility to jam on a jaw harp, you’re gonna go boing. Either way, this music is direct and appealing, more than justifying whatever trouble Ratta went through to share the good shit.
Dog Chocolate — So Inspired So Done In (Upset the Rhythm)
Dog Chocolate, from London, make a fractious, fragmented racket, swarms of stinging discordant guitar notes pinging over the thrash of indeterminate drums. The singing, or rather chanting, is likewise agitated, like Tyvek or, perhaps, Uranium Club.
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Bands like Dog Chocolate can write songs about anything, from potatoes left to sprout in the basement to ill-advised bushwacking expeditions next to the highway. One cheery punk song is all about treatments for facial blemishes (“Fungal Free 2023”). But the thing is, you don’t really notice what these songs are about; you follow them breathlessly as they pogo around the room. The
band, too, often seems enamored of their juddering stuttering grooves. “You can’t just be yelling 1-2-3-4 all that time, that’s silly,” says the bandleader finally after one too many repetitions. But if you can’t yell 1-2-3-4 (and be silly), is it a punk song at all?
And yet, though these songs bristle and hop, they’re not as simple as they might be. “Green Stuff,” an early single, careens in oddly tuned riffs, tinny dissonance embedded in nursery melodies. That’s pretty delicate, but it gets louder from there as detuned blasts of guitar/bass mass in crackling tsunamis of noise. The song closes with a group chorus protesting war. It changes, even wanders, a little.
The point is that there’s enough here to hold your interest, even if you’re full-up on the post-punk experiment, if the idea of one more guy ranting maniacally while another two or three make sharp, conflicting, razor-wire sculptures of sound, doesn’t appeal. Because here’s a band that’s clearly ingested all the necessary Fall/Maps/Ubu/Wire, and churned out not more of the same, but something original and skewed and unexpected.
Given all the socio-political complexity (less generously: cynical, hateful bullshit) associated with black metal, one may have some trepidation about a release that includes a song called “Torquemada” and numerous allusions to Nietzsche: see the song title “As It Gazes Back” and the band’s name, which translates variously to “abyss, and a voracious capacity to swallow.” The perverse appropriation of Nietzsche by right-wing politics is as persistent as it is moronic. One hopes the folks involved in Vorago, a black metal band featuring players from Germany and Mexico, are more circumspect in how they view that abyss, and its capacity to stare in return.
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Those concerns noted, Morulus is exactly the sort of black metal record this reviewer hopes to hear. Scabrous and full of negation, heavy and lancing in equal measure, breathtakingly fast but precisely landing sharp blows somewhere in the listener’s lower abdomen — Vorago have produced a sort of sonic ideal. Of course, ideal is likely the wrong word to use. Songs like “Negative Response” and “Blutkelch” seem engineered with the express purpose of rubbing our snouts in something dirty, malodorous and alarmingly stringent. They do so, with a deeply visceral impact.
Still, to drop a name like Torquemada, either casually or with great drama, and to provide no additional context takes chances, and asks the listener to take chances. To state what one hopes is still an obviousness: Tomás de Torquemada’s issuance of the Alhambra Decree and advocacy for use of torture in the Inquisition’s brutal oppression of Jews are historical atrocities. Playing peek-a-boo with black metal’s national socialist contingent through calculated name-dropping of that sort would be objectionable; slavering worship of Torquemada would more emphatically be a loser position.
It would be nice to be able to listen to black metal without these kinds of qualifications, disclaimers and paranoias. Sadly that’s not the culture we inhabit. Nietzsche may have attempted to project philosophical discourse into a discursive space beyond good and evil, but one doubts the vapid valorization of nihilisms one encounters in the subgenre and among some elements of its listenership is what he had in mind. The sort of aggressively negative noise of Morulus? That might be closer, or at least near to beyond.
This latest salvo from the PDX cosmic outfit is a continuous rush, its multi-guitar onslaught striving towards anthemic, psychedelic motion, its giant drum (a marching band’s bass drum turned onto its side) pounding in ritual, magic exultation. You can still experience the spreading, unbound serenity of past releases—“Walker’s Dead Birds” is, at its center, full of stillness and awe—but, in general, these cuts move. “New Imposition of Light,” is a stirring vortex of 1960s gnostic rock; it will give you some sense of where we are when I say that it reminds me of Aphrodite’s Child’s landmark 666.
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So yes, exciting, excessive, over-the-top and wildly entertaining , all that applies to Abronia’s latest album. There are, as before, nods to the Americana tradition, most particularly in the pedal steel that opens “Mirrored Ends of Light.” However, this music is way more cosmic than country. For one thing, Keelin Mayer carves out a larger space for herself this time around, keening and moaning and wailing in fine Gracie Slick style, as the drums crash and the guitars mass around her. The big drum, as ever, delineates and empowers these songs, its thunderous cadences setting them apart in a ritual space.
Shapes Unravel makes the cases that while trippy head music can be an excellent backdrop for lying motionless on the floor, it can also motivate and enflame. Listen to “Petals and Sand,” a couple of times in a row, and see if you’re not ready to jump up on your warhorse, swinging a sword and conquering worlds. This is stirring stuff, not quite of our world, but close enough to heat the blood.
The association of music and chemically altered perception is far, far older than Spacemen 3’s 1990 Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To, but the title of that record certainly crystallizes a particular feeling and approach. Listeners have no real indication what habits the slightly mysterious rest symbol do or do not have (outside of a description of their music as a “sticky distillate” in the Bandcamp description of rest symbol, and who knows who even wrote that), but the hazy, fractured, restless, beautifully cracked results of their work certainly suggests the music here is intended for, or at least welcomes, a level of impairment in its listeners.
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Not that one needs to be high to enjoy this music, even as parts of it might make the sober feel like they’re catching a buzz. Trip hop is an obvious touchstone here, but not in playing the old favourites so much as taking certain elements of that and other genres (downtempo, broken beat, ambient, dub, psychedelia, etc. etc.) and leaving them to sizzle and warp in the sun. That’s the “sticky distillate” aspect of rest symbol’s sound, an apt way to gesture at the surprising potency of this not-quite-29-minutes. And yet in a world where practically anything can get called an “EP” or “mixtape,” it feels very distinctly like an album. One could separate out the gently crooning “Ascending Shadow” or the sudden pitch into Aphex-esque clashing beats on “Skin” or the rainswept Hollywood noir ambience of “Twelfth Hour,” but the real magic is how all of these tracks combine into a more coherent and seductive soundworld than acts working with twice the time usually manage to summon.
The trio are named as Molinaro, Moreiya, and Wendy Lavone, but little other information is given except that they’ve all had solo releases, and that Moreiya is responsible for the excellent singing throughout. This suits the way that at times rest symbol feels like a strange artifact from another world that has fallen into ours without a Rosetta Stone to interpret it with. The mirrored title conceit of opening and closing tracks “(rest)” and “(break)” seem to almost evoke a cycle, like if you let this play on a loop, it would match exactly. But the actual sonic qualities of both (faded vocal or choral exercises arising from a bed of drone vs. gracefully inscrutable singing over ticking percussion and mournful synth throbs) and the fact that they segue together no better or worse than any two random songs here belie that idea. And yet there is still an air of the ritual here (not an unknown approach in the world of intoxication); not for nothing is one of the tags on their Bandcamp page “devotional.” Devotion to what, one might ask; but listening with the right mindset and/or substances renders that question moot.
We last encountered Midori Hirano in the company of a pair of Berlin electronic improvisers, noting that “A grounding cadence of piano arpeggios, a tremulous wash of strings, the fluting pulse of synthesizers, Berlin experimental artists Sebastian and Daniel Selke (“the brothers”) and Midori Hirano mix together organic and electronic sounds in this meditation on the scale.” Here the Berlin-based artist—who trained on classical piano but has more recently shifted to analog and modular synths—revisits the spare, searching aesthetic on her own, mostly on synthethic keyboards but also on piano.
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On the synthy side, consider the purity of “Before the Silence,” as it negotiates a brief but luminous keyboard riff. It rolls like a wheel, the end of one phrase tucking into the beginnings of the next. A tootling flute-like sound dances across the surface. But despite the electronic instruments, there’s no uncanny valley here, just very clear tones, haloed by space and echo and, yes, silence. The piece grows more dissonant towards the end, a whistling tone wash in the background, vibrating like open air power lines.
The piano cuts are rarer but just as enlightening. “Was It a Dream?’ which closes, is romantic in its intensity, a Chopin nocturne showed by vibrating electronic hiss. “Rainwalk,” by contrast is more forthright and melody. You wouldn’t be surprised to hear a jazz vocal emerge from its sophisticated, lounge-y architecture.
But consistently, the hallmark of this music is clean-ness, quietude and separation. You’re never in a murk or mess or noise. Hirona says that OTONOMA translates as “the space between sounds,” and that’s about right. Both the spaces and the sounds are very beautiful.
Queue up another razor sharp entry in the Paranoid Style catalog, as indie rock’s Dorothy Parker re-assembles her crack new-wave into pop punk band and sallies off to skewer pretension, complacency and lazy thinking. Reviewing The Interrogatora year ago, Dusted’s Alex Johnson heard, “ZZ Top’s fuzzed-out sleaze; the wry, sneering energy of Supersuckers; Elvis Costello’s frothy take on Americana; even Liz Phair with quicker-to-hand, if shallower, retorts,” and that panoply of punk songwriter poets is as relevant here as ever.
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The targets are mostly personal, not political, concerning unsatisfactory men, oddball social encounters and the songwriter herself, one Elizabeth Nelson. Here she is summing up a couple of decades in the R’N’R rat race, with ascerbic style: “Stared out a true believer/started out alone/once I caught the fever/I was a Great Dane with a bone/They told me I’d never make it/I told ‘em where to stick it/Tearing the ticket.”
Nelson rattles off her lyrics like a livestock auctioneer, piling up evocative images and clever rhymes up faster than most people can absorb them. Indeed, it’s often only in the neck snapping turn—the phrase that means one thing until it lurches in another direction—that you have time to appreciate the craft. But once you see it, it’s all over the place, threaded right through these songs’ DNA. For instance,“Dog’s Breakfast” is particularly adept at matching a stop-starting rhythm to words studded with internal rhymes (the words themselves carry the rhythm), but this is a hallmark of Nelson’s art. It’s complicated, contradictory and very specifically drawn. You know exactly what kind of men she’s talking about in “Shark Eyes” and how they differ from the equally vivid crew in “Elegant Bachelors.”
It is customary, when the lyrics are this sharp, not to expect too much from the music, but in this case, the sound is as good as the story. Nelson once again enlists the dBs’ Peter Holsapple into her band, alongside the Mountain Goats’ William Matheny, Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, Choo Choo La Rouge’s Jon Langmead and Timothy Bracy. They make a very late-1970s/early 1980s new-wave/college rock sound, with enough variation between songs to keep things entertaining. Like the Hold Steady, the Paranoid Style sprays a continual stream of hyper-literate poetry against the backdrop of a kicking bar band. Just cause it’s music for smart people doesn’t mean it can’t rip.
On Endless Woe, the lugubriously titled new EP from UK band Final Dose, founding member Bruno Fusco seems intent on shifting musical focus from blackened punk to black metal. The release credits additional musicians (Greg Lewis, Filipe Simoes, Jack Thompson, Sami Tuohino) with songwriting duties, which suggests that the changes to the sonic profile may be a group venture. In any case, it’s encouraging to hear Final Dose playing with enlivened blood coursing through the band’s system — even if that blood bears the mortal dose at issue.
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For sure, there’s a grandiosity to “Floresta Hostil,” signaling a sense of drama that is more performative than anything on Final Dose’s last couple of records (and that’s saying something: check out representative band photos…). The song may not entail a matter of life or death, but it sure wants you to feel emotional stakes on that scale. It’s hard to tell if there’s any irony at play; black metal tends to take itself very seriously, and “Floresta Hostil” borders on the operatic. The remainder of the EP picks up on the sensibility, recalling the song structures of the Secret, if not that band’s inimitably fieriness. Like the Secret, Final Dose seems intent on fusing black metal’s most scabrous qualities with punk’s short sharp shock.
One could justifiably point out that Final Dose has always been working that formula. Perhaps it’s a matter of proportion — or of texture. Kvlty types like to describe trve black metal’s manifestation of iciness: “the songs are so cold.” The inevitable fealty to Scandinavia seems registered in the trope. But there’s a tensile sharpness to the playing and riffage on “Endless Woe”; check out “Golden Challice” and “Forsaken Armor” for especially frigid conditions. Maybe it’s hypothermia that will take Final Dose out, rather than a Jim Jones-style refreshment. However the dosage is calculated, this reviewer digs the current formulation.
Luke Temple & The Cascading Moms — Hungry Animal (Western Vinyl)
Photo by Glenn Lovrich
As outlined in my Dusted review of their debut release, 2024’s Certain Limitations, Luke Temple & The Cascading Moms “artfully combine hazy psychedelic-folk with hard-driving jazz-funk.” On their new album, Hungry Animal, the trio’s synthesis of genres is distilled into more succinct but less singular songwriting. At one end of the spectrum there’s the trebly guitar strut of “Shake Me Awake,” which bristles with live-in-the-rehearsal-room energy that brings to mind early Talking Heads. At the other end of the spectrum there’s the loose-limbed, dreamy desolation of “Emotional Volley,” and the chiming, acoustic-guitar counterpoint of “One Heavenly Body,” a late-album highlight. Whichever direction Luke Temple leads his limber rhythm section of drummer Kosta Galanopoulos and bassist Doug Stewart, the results are intricate, catchy, and heartfelt.
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The band bursts out of the gate with the nodding propulsion and needling organ stabs of “Clean Living,” then eases into standout single “Echo Park Donut” with its addictive refrain “You are the billionth hand of God.” This is the sweet spot for the Cascading Moms: balancing drive with expansiveness. On “Bed Time for Eddy,” hard-panned, chorused guitar parts carry the song, culminating in a fizzy guitar solo that’s backed by some of the more ferocious playing on the record. ”Early Spring” is another highlight, combining gentle vocal delivery akin to Devendra Banhart with the swinging mischief of Aldous Harding.
Though the trio’s instincts sing true for the majority of the 11 songs, sometimes there are details that derail their finely struck balance. The prominent woody percussion effect on “Loose White Paper” feels like having a cartoon woodpecker hammering away inside your skull. And though there’s a lovely yearning quality to “Love Means Light Year,” Temple’s voice reaches into a register that makes his otherwise resounding instrument sound a little thin.
When “One Zero” rounds out the record with 1980s funk guitars, synths and drum machines, the band shifts gears yet again, suggesting Hungry Animal is another phase in the continuing evolution of this beguiling beast.
