PICK OF THE DAY

Crashing in from Denmark, Swash shows up to this single with a path that progresses in a way most bands never accomplish, no matter how many songs they attempt.

The sound is strict and immediate, but with an aggravated corner that keeps the temperature feeling unpredictable and continually sweltering.

The song kicks straight in with drums clocking along like a racecar driving up to a traffic light. Hits bash with the guitars, as the vocals gush and boil. The bombardment of yelling, talking, and singing mixes together like heavy shades of every pastel in the center of a painter’s palette crushed into a new pigment. It’s a throat grinding yell that fits so perfectly into the sound, it doesn’t feel like an attack as much as a call to fight.

Swash appears in full form as soon as the song starts. In a lesser bands hands, the next almost 4 minutes, would sound very similar to what happens in the first 30 seconds. But Swash has much better plans to keep going places. It’s a tour of the tallest mountains and darkest clouds colliding in an atmosphere, out of reach.

The guitar leads change with every turn making this song more interesting to listen to with every ticking second. The leads keep flying in, and continually become the new best part of the song.

The back and forth between concrete-draining-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean strums, and the release-of-balloons in the leads that float around like frantic lightning, make the pattern of the song work so easily, because every lead turns the song again. It’s like a screen saver constantly refreshing to the new coolest graphic of a gigantic ice pick driving through the center of an entire planet.

Swash pace between loud drives and cleaner guitar led ease, and the dynamic continually shifts. It’s never a place to get comfortable, but more to bang your head along and listen closer for what part comes next. The end drives the song out without relenting, but Swash opens and closes the gate so many times that by the time the gate breaks off, it’s necessary to follow the chaos out.

Upon the initial listen, the song slices from the first seconds, but about halfway through, the guitar lead changes to possibly my favorite part in any song I’ve heard this year. The guitar lead soars back in, and this time has a major lift in the tone. It juxtaposes itself against the rest of the song like a clean basket of laundry poured into the center of a pit of boiled knives. Right past the two-minute mark the bass walks the song up as the guitar cuts open, and the surgical simplicity of this new lead lets the entire song blow up to proportions bigger than a grinning, teal sun.

This song burns from the center outward. It shines as much as it attacks, it bounces as much as it fights. It’s the most intense song I feel like I could convince ANYONE to like listening to. (Massive compliment.)

Before we ever heard a wriggling guitar note, or gutted cry from red sun, the mythical temperature of this band was rising all around us. Everywhere we looked someone was talking about red sun, or red sun themselves was building an online presence that felt like something special that everyone needed to be paying attention to. red sun followed us on Twitter and we all felt like we had been pulled into a part of something we didn’t quite understand. There’s an immediate legendary-ness to red sun that has become inescapable. The good news for red sun, and all of us, is the band isn’t just cool and popular because they are incredible at their own PR, their music is even better than the mythic proportions surrounding them.

This new EP, “best buds :),” directs a focus and tension from the start that never relents. The songs are fast, and short, and carry a depth of musicianship that is overloaded with a certain panic, scaling the music into a swirling undercurrent. For every electric guitar floating up above the roof of every normal house, Quinn Wilcox and Zeke McPhail work overtime in vocals that grate and call, worry and break, in ways that make the weight of the songs tangible.

Right in the center of the EP, on “Faker! What Was That?!” there’s a break where the bouncing slows into a guitar part paired with rolling tom drums, the vocals burrow under the sound, and a concern overtakes in some kind of spoken rant. But, red sun doesn’t leave it there, an extended outro takes over with the slightest starry-eyed, synthesized sequence, trailing the guitars into a moment of breathing. An ambient end, like the feeling of standing at a bus stop after the bus drives away. Just the quiet of the motor rolling on and exhaust clouding the day. It’s this moment of red sun recognizing the listener that leaves just a moment of quiet before kicking right up into complexities of universes colliding in the bit crushed guitar intro of “red SUNFO,” as Wilcox yells, “SAID I’M OVERRATED.”

There’s a familiarity to what red sun does, with choruses so giant and wide, it’s an immediacy of being able to learn and sing along. “…Saucy!!!,” hooks and sings in such a direct way, it feels like a song I’ve already sung along to, not like it sounds like something else I’ve heard, but it’s so well-crafted it immediately sticks.

The lyrics deal in heavy loads of vulnerability and willingness to confront the self, and the uncertainty of pieces of life that don’t feel as direct or easy. Or the realizations of such concepts as “I hate waking up to the same sun every morning,” melting into just Wilcox crying out, “I hate waking up.” It’s a degradation of the situation complimented by waves of backing vocals and rising drums and guitars suffocating the pain into feedback.

The real bed of gems is the intricate musicianship and arrangements of these songs. red sun leaves no space, no emptiness, it’s a 5-track sprint, where relentlessness feels necessary and continually interesting. The guitars spin through the beginning of, “Ball McCartney,” like some kind of video game that’s never been created, where you have to venture through tunnels and pyramids somewhere no one has ever been before. The drums and bass compliment the complications in between guitar chords in just the right balance to keep everything moving together across the EP. It’s a master class in songwriting with more than expected, but never more than necessary.

On, “faker! What was that?!,” Wilcox sings, “And if these things from my mouth / keep coming out / I’ll lose everything / I claim to care about.” My advice would be to sort out whatever those things are, and instead keep singing more songs, and give us a full-length, because this is some of the best music we’ve heard this year.

(Thumbs Up Records)

How did Magazine Beach make these two new tracks sound so big? The D.C. band climbs a sound to the tallest buildings in the world. It’s a height of vertical limit that seems maximized in ways that when the guitars, bass and drums, enter in, it generates more space for the vocals to move like some sort of fully realized weather pattern around a ring in the center of the universe, ever expanding. Stretching on beyond anything you could see the top of, it’s the sound of an ocean being set into motion in new areas that none of us ever saw before. It’s an ocean of ink in the center of a scorched continent.

From the onset of the tunnel of voice singing, “You’re the reason I vacuum,” before everything starts building and collapsing all at once, Magazine Beach returns with a power that rivals tectonic instabilities. The drumming carries and drives, while also interjecting sped up fills to create a heavier heave of tension throughout the songs. Voices spiral through mountain range mist and crag, exacting a density to compliment the rising humidity in instrumentation.

These two songs chain together as one giant shove.

Where “Vacuum” momentarily stalls, “Turnaround,” hits again like a fist against a continental shelf, and back into the deluge it all goes. To understand exactly what’s going on, go to the middle of the second of these two songs, where the sound gets gobbled up by the perfected guitar part that cuts right through the center like a knife through a piece of fruit left on a counter as decoration.

Magazine Beach whirls this new sound in a way that wants to be leaned into, but to fully hear it, must be zoomed out to see the entire geography of these colliding land masses. It feels like a sunrise in a place that was already bright. It feels like a moon crashing right in front of you. It’s a solar flare that becomes its own system of existence. Regions and measures exceeding known limits.

(Take This To Heart Records)

Man Man sounds like you’ve been waiting a decade to finally go on a tropical vacation. You saved it all up, and now you’re at the resort, and the entire place is haunted. Just skeleton hands holding margaritas.

Lights flickering.

The ocean full of teeth.

Somewhere between a caustic green crayon, scratching across the surface of a knifed up table, and a can of glow-in-the-dark spray paint lighting up the side of an abandoned bridge, lies the genius of what Man Man creates.

Man Man consistently stays painfully underrated in a world of other, (not as exciting bands) getting some bright lights and conversation.

Man Man deserves better from Earth.

As I’ve spent my time listening over this Philadelphia originated, now in L.A., band’s discography, I’ve continued to find myself confused as to why Man Man isn’t one of the largest pillars in the world of cabins. There’s an attention to detail, a willingness to try things, mixed with an incredible mindset of song crafting and melody creating, that slides like undeniable ooze all over darkened alleyways. Man Man, fronted by Honus Honus, lives alone in a rickety house on the top of a windy hill that everyone’s too afraid to fully approach.

With Man Man’s return in the shape of this new single “Iguana,” we are sucked right back into the frame of a world that’s half a warped cartoon, and half, as real as road rash. A world of spindles and piano keys that go off the actual instrument and out into orbit. It’s not like anything else you’re gonna hear, and that’s why it’s critical that you listen.

“Iguana,” a song that in one way seems to be pleading for the existence of all the money in the world to work as a cure, jammed against the image of a “lizard hanging out on a rock” splits the smoothest brain into koala sized wonder. But Honus Honus isn’t satisfied with just stating the existence of this chilled out lizard, there’s also a ‘making sure’ you are cool with the vibe of this imagery. 


The song leads in with over a minute and a half of an intro that builds on itself like a gelatinous core forming into a gaseous planet. An extended section that grows like moss on the back of a camel running across a 2-D desert. The drums play casual like a t-shirt tucked into khakis, but a drive in the approach feels unescapable, a comet crashing into your neighborhood, and then grinding to a halt like a slip-n-slide for celestial rocks.

There’s a yowl in the center of the song, a quick werewolf scratching through your screen door.

At the end, the song breaks apart with what sounds like a return of the glowing-eyed-growl, before the creeping-shell-at-the-bottom-of-the-sea melody splashes back in for just a few more moments. There’s a ghost in the wall, calling out without anything surrounding it now. No spoons rattling in the drawer. No floorboards creak. The drums just carry it right back in for a close that might seem unnecessary in anyone else’s hands. But the more you listen to the song, the more you know Man Man at all, the more it makes complete sense that they would finish it this way.

Honus Honus gargles and gaggles like crows and geese in a pool that’s slowly being poisoned. But then there’s that falsetto at the end of the chorus lines that sounds like gold rings falling off a momentary cloud. The voice lifts like a helium balloon in the hand of a puppet. It’s just enough to keep the song moving in the direction that you weren’t expecting, but now you gotta hear again. This is the intricacies Honus and crew write in. Man Man create like hundreds and thousands of fishing lines with the sharpest hooks you’ve ever heard, grabbing up every side of your listening, so that you can’t get away.

This is a welcome return of a band that we hope we can help make the biggest band in the world.

(Sub Pop)

The isolation of waiting at a bus station, train station. A ticket to move across expanses, but for now, the busy noise of engines and motors, yelling and phone calls. Human sound.

The Fourth Wall develops a 9-song pattern of sureness in songwriting amongst the gulping waves of high-tension paneling every region and area around the darts hitting the board.

“Return Forever,” opens with “Interrupts The Dream,” which sonically cuts in, as if the listener is carried for a moment by the long sound of the introduction, then Stephen Agustin sings, like a voice cracking a dream into the reality of, “time to wake up.”

Softly, The Fourth Wall lulls the listener to a looking around, an arising to the fullness of sound about to strike. Guitar notes pattering like squared rain drops off the side of an old home. Categories of furious sound like benches, filing cabinets, desks pushed across a grating floor. The hands of ghosts rising from the waves of dark oceans pulling away from the shoreline. A swell. A broken bone. A goose egg.

Drums rage, and The Fourth Wall unveils the maximum of the sound this album will carry. It’s introductory like new characters joining a familiar frame.

As this Portland five-piece ventures on through the album, the tension between the humming under the hood, and the stark lyricism and melody of Agustin’s vocalizing of seemingly being lost, and never fully finding an exit, or maybe it’s an entance? The gush of sound always tip- toeing around the fringes until beckoned into drowning.

“Never A Part,” balances that stern, crooked finger pointing a wave of electric horses through the gate, while trimming like a pocket knife enough to hear Agustin sing, “You’ll never be a part of whatever they are,” as clearly and quietly as possible. The air vacuumed right out of the room.

The dimensions and measurements of space The Fourth Wall utilizes leaves no part on the map empty of at least traversing through. If nothing else, flying over with a scan to recognize topographies.

Regions become guitar progressions. Mountain peaks become tom fills. Rivers become melodies woven by Agustin and Kendall Sallay. Ridges are bass lines. It’s all a mapped terrain that sounds like The Fourth Wall is discovering as they play.

This album leaves no bloat, no extra inch, it’s methodically expanded and shrunken into place with every second.

The acoustic drive of “Darkness of Heart,” gives a shade of relief from the giants of sound surrounding, only to be caught back by the constant feeling of uncertainty when everything will build back into a tower. It comes in the unearthly tone of a guitar blaring like a siren in a field of grain.

“Conatus,” leads in with a programmed beat, like an electric mountain- top surrounding by the calling of a seashell held to an ear.

“Return Forever,” an immediately digestible album, hides so much in the sound, that it could be unfolded and analyzed forever. A flat piece of paper with millions of invisible creases. A road that keeps spanning over water or land or empty space.

A storm door left unlocked, turning on its hinge.

Navy blue wind lapping against the side of an empty house, where the air can move through the slats of siding.

If Dallas Texas’s Side Saddle wants to sing about “Moving out west,” a repeated cadence collected in the choruses, the sound of this band makes the motion into something tangible. Steps toward getting wherever the west is.

Credited at the helm of this band, Ian McGuinness sings like watching the smooth stone faces of a mountain side from a moving window. The whole of the band sets in an immediacy of big moves. Drums like thunderheads out on the horizon. Guitars move like different sediments shuffling toward a tributary. Acoustic cutting through the middle like a picnic knife, while the electrics worm through the outsides like sunlight up ahead.

The drop off into the bridge is the moment where the song ties like a sparrow with thread through its feet. A moment where everything falls under the surface. The bands sounds like a river. A converging in reflection and movement all at once. The stones, the water bugs, the shining skin of a fish for a second. Before completing the move to wherever this is rolling.

Based on where this is starting, we’re following Side Saddle’s moves from here.

(Cedar Lodge Records)

First of all, A Country Western is the best name for a band.

Every time I think about this fact, I feel so happy for this Philadelphia 4-piece, that they got the name before anyone else could.

Most excellent label, Crafted Sounds, has announced the upcoming A Country Western full length (!), and here we have the first single, “The Dreamer.”

With gargling guitar strums, and wide-open drums, A Country Western sweeps in with added acoustic guitar picking, synthesized keyboard notes, and dead-eyed vocals. A little drum machine sprinkles in even, and somehow A Country Western keeps this altogether in a straight line. The sound of a band that knows exactly what they’re here to do, and can sprinkle flourishes here and there without getting lost in making noises to try something.

A song that moves and shifts through many parts and pieces, all stacking together in a boiling reflective pool, dealing through some kind of loss of the “dreamer,” in the name of being held back by someone else. The abruptness of the end lines, “I was always a dreamer / But you, you called me a loser,” takes all the banners waving in the sky, and knocks them back down to Earth. Kind of like the realization that not just any band could manage all that’s been displayed in this song so easily, while executing it all so well.

A Country Western doesn’t have to show anything off, it’s just an obvious vein of well worked songwriting, with the ability to dynamically keep the tempo, the mindset, without just guitars and drums bashing through to make a song.

(Crafted Sounds)

Oil on an ice-skating rink.

That actual realization that someone feeling sick can kind of really look a little green.

The way winter can chew up the edges of a browned leaf.

Root rot pushing up through the soil.

Washer returns with “You’re Also A Jerk,” a grumbling dissertation in dealing with yourself, other people, embarrassment. It’s a quick injection of slamming through guitar chords that sound like, the way lights reflect in a dog’s eyes in a dark yard, and tennis shoe drum beats, stomping along to confront whoever’s, “also a jerk.”

Mike Quigley and Kieran McShane don’t need anyone else to heave the layers and hilltops of sound they push together through instruments, and Quigley’s howling, that sews the loud sounds into something sincere, and sincerely aggravated.

The realness of the line, “You’re only human / But you’re also a jerk,” simplified down to everyone’s reality of at least one person we know or have known, hits far harder than something wrapped in swatches of lyricism lost in its own revelations.

Washer shows up to throw a punch back, say what needs to be said, and leave before 2 minutes is over.

A song so good, and so quick, you should listen to it 10 times in a row.

(Exploding In Sound)

The ease in the sounds of instruments, the slight of wind through cattails, or corn stalks, or slats in the house, where the boards no longer sit flush.

The cool of a guitar trickling over the chorus like a sparkling river, for a moment.

Landing in a new city for a few days just to look around, maybe shift everything, forever.

Apples With Moya, a Seattle band we recently heard, from their last very good single, “Nettles,” creates in a 6-person scope of casual strums and intricate-as -worm -tunnels in winding pathways. But as the sound created, a subtle land breeze over sand and sawdust, passes along, the lyrics cut like something more than just a knife through a flat cake.

From the sound of guitar easing the song in over snare hits that sound like entering a room in the house you grew up, the band begins piling into the frame, gently. Even when the chorus builds into a micro break, and on into the smallness of a chorus that doesn’t have to be the framed picture behind the desk. Just a quick question, and then on.

“Wanna get gone but for good? / When do roots forestall a slight change?”

Apples With Moya navigates AND observes in the moments on a trip away in L.A.

There’s a breaking away for a breath, while this underlying searching paces the track. That feeling of enjoying a new place until it hurts, and there’s that moment when you’re looking at how different the sun lays out on water, or the way the height of the buildings measures against the sky, and you think you could probably uproot it all, and live here forever.

Cam LaFlam carries the band forward with a voice like a letter left in a mailbox, calculating through the changes in guitars, and John Law Harrison’s steadiness on the drums.

Toward the end, LaFlam sings,

“Meeting someone far from home / is not a magic chrysanthemum / that grows and grows / without an ounce of work.”

And while there might be some strain in wherever this long distance situation lands, Apples With Moya unfolds this track like that enchanted flower, breezing through a screen door, like the song just skimmed up off the top of a chain of lakes somewhere far from home, that’s shaped like the shape of your house.

Years ago, I watched a VHS tape called “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire,” which was a hyped up, Power Rangers PSA about fire safety. I remember realizing this fact I’d never considered in such detail of the signs of fire always coming from the thick blackness of air disturbed into disappearing.

Last week, I could see a pyre of black disintegration in the air far off, but as I drove toward it, realized the train burning up was right near me. The smoke was calling out across the sky that something was being devoured in thick black gulps.

The first line of this new Garden Home track shrieks, “The smell of smoke,” and while the tee up of a sign of fire is the stench rather than a tower curling up, THIS is a sign that Garden Home has returned to start a fire that seems unquenchable.

Where Garden Home in the past has delivered tracks with some bite, on “The Worst Of It,” it seems the Milwaukee four-piece has gained unbreakable fangs.

The heave from the onset crushed forward with a continual barrage of projectiles in the form of drums lapping up the darkness with snapping jaws, and guitars tremoring any structure in sight in the name of blasting every wall into pieces.

Twice in this song, Garden Home landscapes the next seconds with something appearing to be a relief. First, near a minute and half, the guitar lead shakes off the initial distortion for a processed pattern that ends up running alongside the heave like a knife attached to make a rifle into a bayonet.

Two thirds through the song sounds like it’s ending for just a second, before Garden Home pulls the whole thing back into the ring, removes any gloves, and punches the ending into a never-ending K.O.

Screaming “Feel the worst of it / Make the worst of it.”

An entire forest brought to its knees by clouds of fire falling like bricks off a skyscraper.

This track sounds like the dawn of a sun on the verge of engulfing an entire solar system, a moment for Garden Home to explode into something bigger and brighter than ever before.

(Thumbs Up Records)