Picture standing on the top of a mountain.

Picture your head is inside of a giant jar of water with jellyfish inhabiting the sides.

Picture a glass room surrounding filled with butterflies so thick there’s no view off the top of this peak.

Picture a river running beneath.

Picture the moon with an eye drawing closer and closer in.

Picture a canoe floating around this glass enclosure with no rower.

Picture this entire situation printed out in a photograph.

Picture the photograph nailed to the wall in an abandoned food court.

(100% Silk)

Repetition in stance and posture.

Repetition in stance and posture.

Cutting with shears shapes in clean sheets.

Structure can’t be set up correctly without foundation. These are foundational tracks.

Built from the base and very carefully projected upward.

Allow the space and time to watch the connections be brought together without an attempt to rush this.

Sparse, purposeful, old and creaking, a wooden floor with some spongey points, and some slats that will never lose a nail.

Anna St. Louis sings around the arrangements of shimmering keys and marching drums, sailing strings, and guitars in the background like a cricket under the porch.

This album waves in the wind, a floral pattern hanging on the drying line.

The melodies curl around the corner like wind on the other side of the house.

An album that rests like fruit on a plate waiting to become raisins.

(Woodsist)

“Gravity holding everything in place, lets up in moments in the middle of the night, so sand and sea jump and float, for moments, not forever.”

Skip down beneath the surface tension of earth and worm and root, to where the insects with the certain shells burrow, and peak up for a spot of air that doesn’t cling to musty clouded reality.

The place where pincers are shoveled into sand/into loam/into the bases of flowering stalks.

Find Andrea’s multicolored mapping of texture and landscape developed under what looks certain and resounding.

Recently there was a news story somewhere between a conspiracy theory and a mystery I never heard the end of, that told of a place in China where a sinkhole appeared and in the ground: a subterranean world, rumored to still hold living dinosaurs and ancient trees. “Due In Color,” would be the soundtrack to play throughout this underground artifact zoo.

Subtle stop and starts inside of a single track move and regress in ways that make the whole experience of just one song, or a single minute of a song into something teeming with life and shapes and shadows, all breathing air with lungs crafted by hands in a laboratory, or maybe outside of space and time.

Beats appear in acoustic sounds bejeweled by the glittering synthetic developments of sound and shape beyond natural manipulation. The base layers surrounding these moving elements work as a team of posture and stance that merges worlds like a Venn diagram but the circles are spherical planets circulating like air conditioning on a jumbo jet. The center a collection of images you think you understand, but could be hieroglyphs from a past history we haven’t decoded, or even discovered.

“Audieze,” grows from a singular toned ringing of a computer bell, under the direction of a bass line working as the landscape in some old video game where the ground continues layering up and up to the final boss. Drums pass by like wind and rain.

A track like “Remote Working,” obviously titled to a time and place we’ve all become familiar like a magnifying glass to, blips and moves like all the fresh cables suddenly imported into the wall of homes that never knew the need.

The pastures these tracks rely on as home bases to grow out of feel authentically calculated to develop out of. Andrea never strays from the origin points of sound and sculpted resonance each moment starts in, but the wide-open valleys they become are moved in inches and centimeters rather than yards or miles. There’s a guiding finger pointing ahead so nothing ever feels like a rockslide, as much as a left turn.

“Chessbio,” strums in, maybe, clicks together like a cricket on a Ferris wheel, and begins a circular motion out of the space between swimming sounds and notes plucked from under the layered frosting on top of a digital cake. As the Sega Genesis punch of a snare leads in, and the bass grimaces, that candy-coated theme park ride from before, suddenly stands as a shadow where the lights blink inward.

These are sounds

are songs

are film developed out of the back of a camera floating in the middle a night road that won’t let up until the last wave has crashed and the ocean dries up.

A journey to the center of somewhere, a land Andrea brought us all to.

(Ilian Tape)

OUR RVW: “Stacking. Stacking. Fit every box into the moving truck, it all shifts into stew when the corner turns.”

The murky ink of walking up a staircase after all of the nights go out, the rooms are settled, and the home is dark. The last one there, to lock up, to check the handles, to close the window. The strange adjusting the eyes have to make with spots where the light left impressions and the blinking only moves those bits of color you can see/can’t see fully, are popping across the field of vision. Familiar shapes rest and settle, appearing like creatures ready to pounce. It’s just a lamp on a book.

Emerging from Kazakahstan, Asleep Country pieces and places melody and texture together like a stack of translucent photographs: a street, a city, a family smiling, possibly a ghost captured on film(?), a horse midway through jumping into the sea, the heat of unending summer, the blister of a cold hand retracing steps to try to find a lost glove.

The core melody of the keyboard that bubbles and sweeps upward, one over the next, measures like the wings of a hologram seagull. To grab ahold of a feather would be impossible, but the sound of the trajectory is true, and full of direction. It appears like staircases in a maze that expect lost people to move upward, but the stairs keep shifting from place to place. The clouded concept of a second story, dissolving.

The pacing of this nearly sixteen-minute track builds momentum as layers of percussion and a mysterious flute, swirls to the front of the mix. The wind instrument always behind the next corner, but never able to be see or identified. The ghost of the seagull flying behind it all as the swirl becomes a weather pattern.

Driving on two roads at the same time.

Watching the television and a phone at the same time.

The complication of sound allows the patterns and portions to lead at once. Nothing drives specifically. Even the original growing melody consistently keeps moving but never enough to be given an opportunity to be heard in clarity.

The shifting and changing over from one moment to the next, the stutter in time, the bits of sound to grab on to, slip and shift like holding a poisonous snake that aggressively works to either strike, or weave back into the tall plants swaying in the midst of a mirage.

Nearing the 10-minute mark, all that’s overwhelmed in the soup of busy street and ghostly bird, fades away, revealing a technical toned synthetic bass that bounces like boots against the ground of a rusted moon. Robotic key patterns begin entering into a screen for codes, and skittering becomes percussive. Like a voice speaking the language a drum kit would talk in. Wings of insects with metallic shells flap right up against the front of it all. A heaving cloud.

Asleep Country working like archaeologists picking away at the frame and form of condensed multiplication, revealing something human trying to talk behind all of the geography merging and mashing. It’s the development of Pangaea or the breaking apart.

This track alone leaves many trails to hike across, places to try to identify, landscapes to sketch with eyes closed. Nothing is certain, but when that floating wing of melody reappears, the seagull, flies back across the tumbleweed caught on the hoof of an animal no one has ever discovered before, there’s something tinny about the overflowing sound of that winged trajectory. The layers battered the flight pattern, and the story, unsettled, floats away into seconds of calming, cooling pools.

(New Motion)

The texture of dry wall scraped off so the smooth wall has memories, has scars has something where texture once lived.

Tokyo’s aus fills up the shapes and sizes of elongated landscapes like a sun or a fish tank brimming with clear water.

What micro biomes are living inside of the slight liquid can only be viewed from microscopically listening to everything collecting at the surface.

The size and magnitude of the sounds on this album will continue growing the way a garden stalk emerges to a new height overnight. Watch for the careful patterns and causeways to be created, create themselves.

The expanse inside of these two new songs feels like listening to a room full of sounds rather than a singular stream of noises.

Everything glows and highlights at the same time and nothing lacks.

There fullness, the richness of every detail, piece and part become’s evident immediately and in only two songs, everything is right here.

The melodies and backing vocals rise like waves that never turn or crash.

“Savior Mode,” drives like hammering a spike into soft grass, piercing the renewal of summer for a constant driving down to reach what can’t be seen on the surface.

“Last To Know,” stretches like a sunset that never actually sets. The low glow of orange becoming red hangs in the air like evening that stays forever.

(Memory Music)

Still having an amazing time recognizing Beach Fossils being back with this good of songs.

Beach Fossils has consistently delivered since that first 2010 white-paneled-wall album. And here we are with a brand new single that chimes and breathes like a bear sleeping in a tree, and a horseshoe crab waiting for the tide to draw it back into the water.

The chorus hooks, the guitars rest on the right shelves in the office, the drums clink like ice in a shallow glass, the bass drives like a small red car on the way home.

Home, still there.

(Bayonet Records)

Camp fire grows legs and walks around the old floorboards.

Rust on the side of everything where moss was supposed to grow.

Aging hands trying to pour the pitcher into the glass.

Clouds become fog become road rash.

Circles wear out until they gain angles.

Temperatures unidentified as too hot or too cold.

Ice melting on an old stovetop.

Cans falling out of window.

Benny Sings captures a photo book of images in magazines when everyone was smiling. It’s the delivery of a whole meal on a table stretching from one door to the other.

It’s melodies and harmonies like hard candy in a glass dish shaped like green grapes.

It’s a wood paneled television playing a show you forgot you loved when you were younger. There it is! And it makes you feel alive, and real, and right back to a time when simplicity was the leader.

This album is another edition of Benny Sings ability to write hit after hit, and somehow fly directly under the credit and radar so deserved.

(Stones Throw)

I put aside the ex-Every Time I Die 🤝 Guy Puciato MEGA GROUP situation we have here, to give this track a fair shake, without preconceived decisions that it would HAVE TO rule.

But it does actually just 100% RULE. It’s absolute in relentlessness. There’s not room for air. There’s nothing that breaks apart to something dynamically lesser. It cuts like a blade and crushes like a city full of wrecking balls on a planet smashing into a dying star.

It’s stuffy like a room with no windows and no thermostat in the Summer.

It wont’s stop pushing through the wall. Even when the wall has fallen.

(Sharptone Records)

A return from a band we could wash away and not even try.

Oh them again?

YES! And it rules!

It’s the cool of tree leaves shimmering like fish skin in summer afternoon.

It’s the slight tart in a glass of juice at country club brunch.

It’s a chandelier that’s going to slip from the ceiling, but we can’t count the days until the crystals crack.

It’s a sideways smile when the grass dies and no one can stop it.

A coliseum of insects building clocks in a different dimension. Beyond formalized time.

Seconds are shapes, hours: gelatinous structures like monuments.

The keyboards mirroring and echoing in different tones and textures stack like subdivisions outside of a city where every tower stands like a glittering maroon spire, up and out, over and above clouds that keep weather patterns like a secret menu.

Elephant Butte, New Mexico’s Brainwaltzera creates a set of distances in underwater scribbling and lunar air like the condensation on the inside of an oversized plastic bag.

(FILM)

Scattered across the quilt, unfolded from the closet, a lineage of photographs taken with a broken lens, capture pieces of whole moments. Half of someone you love, and then zig zags of light refracted through the cracking of glass. The way memories under develop as time passes, and the minutes become forgetting why you’re even in the room to begin with.

OUR RVW: “Open the cabinet, the dish with the rose color patterned plate sits where the light always shines on every side.”

Some far off patch of green lawn glowing in the morning dew and gleam of sun splashing off the clouds and out of the crystal sky as a blanket of warmth ready to be felt.

Somewhere in the middle of a state without a name, there’s a pay phone jangling and shaking from a call no one is going to answer.

There are wood paneled walls, and brand new concrete structures standing right beside each other like adult brothers in a photograph all over Buddie’s new album “Agitator.”

From the surely warm invitation of Daniel Forrest’s lead vocals beckoning and waving from windows a few stories up, to the spin of guitar strings woven together like a family blanket some legend made years ago. Treated like precious metals, this tapestry of family history gets a special place in the room. A crown in a cave.

Buddie work to keep the temperature on the thermostat at a level right between a little too warm, but never drafty.

With concise tracks, never shimmering out past five minutes, the design in each song works precisely and proficiently to accomplish everything possible without maximizing or overdoing anything at all.

From the initial wind-in-a-wide-open-field of the acoustic on “Break of the Sun,” there’s a lightness to even the big drums sweeping in. With words soaring over the fresh morning of this story of hiking, experiencing life “out of body/inside the glow,” this album deals in high places, and smiling because the world is actually just exactly where we are and how it is.

That is the description of how Buddie sounds, and seemingly creates, everything is exactly how it is. The sound, the words, dealing in views and places to operate out of recognizing and observing right where we are.

“Game of Global Consequence,” spangles like a fully spun garden spider’s web catching overnight rain, and shining like a mirror in the morning sun.

The secret best track on the album is absolutely “Worried,” that bashes softly like a foam hockey stick against a brittle window. That electric guitar sputtering a shining line of gold holding under the gunky gutter collection of drums and bass sits perfectly and lands like teeth shining when someone opens an unexpected door, or gift, or conversation.

On closer, “Restive Summer,” the subtly in poignant words lands when Forrest sings, “The truth weighs heavy on/And I wonder how we’ll go to sleep.” The charm of the sound can nearly blot out the recognition of what’s really going on, but Buddie sees it all, and can handle it, so so can you.

Buddie does not miss.

This entire album lands like different colored lines of chalk alongside one another on a midday sidewalk.

An album to disappear down a side road or river to.

Open a window. Whatever weather is unfolding is worth feeling and listening to.

(Crafted Sounds)

OUR RVW: “The horses ran back into their stables, as soon as the tiny hands of rain reached down from clouds shaped like front doors.”

“We’ll Never Break” starts with acoustic curls inviting as arms beckoning in for a small get together.

The warmth of windows through thin sheets of silent snow out on the sidewalk.

When Daniel Forrest says, “And if I had only known what you needed,” the curve of the melody lands like a tiny continent on a hand drawn map where everything is exactly as it seems.

Buddie debuts their forthcoming album with “We’ll Never Break,” a process of familiarity in guitars and kick drum walking like feet on a path the family takes every day, around the way and back home just like yesterday.

This track is described by the band as a practice in assuring someone of devotion, of staying right where everything’s been built. Structure.

Buddie echoes this vision in the work of directing the listener to choruses resting like a water plant on the surface of a warm lake.

It’s genuine and lit up, allowing even for a moment when Forrest nearly lets the gentle speed of everything build a little higher. Like he might yell for a second.

The guitar that ends the song spreads out like a blanket of sun on a patch of ground with tiny sprouts just appearing.

A circle, a square somewhere seen before with new things becoming the ground cover. When the second guitar mirrors in, and then the song sleeps, it’s a completion in a moment, a race run, everything closed up and all the doors locked.

(Crafted Sounds)

Édouard Ribouillault works directly.

The stomps moving around headphones as the hum of some unknown machine warms lead this track into a pasture where milky blue liquid takes the places of a valley being cut out.

Scissors within fingers within ghost hands holding the reigns of a horse with more eyes than mane.

Keep walking when the tape plays backwards.

Back masking the encryption you’ll never gain understanding for.

This song burns like the end of a candle. The flame melting into a pool all its own.

When the bass picks a place, the looming of fog down the street is suddenly behind the lenses of your glasses.

Don’t watch the TV, it’s happening right in front of you now.

(In Paradisum)

I have no idea how to tell you how exciting and thrilling this album sounds and conceptually feels.

A collaboration between producers Jon Dix and Joe Quirke, the pair have created the soundtrack to an imaginary video game full of candied settings and saccharine melodies.

Babble over cola and sherbet as the journey matches entirely on the mark of the aptly titled toothachey tracks.

The landing space is somewhere between a fairy’s magic wand, and a cave full of unidentifiable gemstones.

Turn every corner, eat the meringue roof, and keep tunneling through the massive Cotton Candy landscape of an album that came out of nowhere, and deservedly now sits on the shelf of our most enjoyed concoctions we’ve heard this year.

(Métron Records)

OUR RVW: “The turning over from Summer to Autumn with an oven mitt holding the whole of the yard.”

2023, in all of its surprises and turns, has developed into the year of the split. Splits are one of the strongest formats of musical releases because it’s a solidified length of an EP, but with songs from two artists. So when the artists on a split are exceptionally great, the split is more than a listener could even ask for.

When we got the information that, Phoenix’s Celebration Guns, and Denver’s, A Place For Owls, had a surprise split on the way on Really Rad Records, it hit harder than we were ready for. Two of our very favorite bands, releasing a split together on one of our very favorite labels. The expanse of possibility exploded!

Then the split actually debuted, and the four songs that have been turned in are not only some of both bands best work to date, but a perfected concoction of overlap between two bands that should absolutely work in the same orbit.

Celebration Guns starts here with the mix of well-developed songwriting that’s easy to immediately enter in to, with a steady peppering of dynamic that makes every single second land with high value. This band creates in a sphere all their own, while allowing space to easily access just what’s being stirred here. From the very start of those sticky lily pad guitar notes stretching out on “Whatever Gets You Through The Day,” the band builds around to Justin Weir’s soft envelope delivery of vocals trailing over Timothy O’Brien utilizing every bit of energy those drums can manage. The rise and crashing quiet that continue to switch back and forth set up an entry point on this split that grapples with everything to come in between seconds and moments. Claps and wood block clicks batter the sides of guitars that strum like white-out condition driving all the way to some vacation guitar stabs, and those intro notes reappearing to close. It’s rapturous and heartfelt in a way that divides and unites all of the best of what Celebration Guns does so well.

“Tin Foible,” enters like the gentleness of a windy day finally steadying and quieting. Ryan Miller moves around on the bass like people rearranging the formation of couches and chairs in a family room, before Justin Weir and Christopher Ignacio-Blanco scramble the entire blueprint of a floorplan with dueling guitars that move like the windstorm returning for a moment just to shake and shatter the bird feeder and the wind chimes. The resting place, the sobering quiet hush of the waterfall of an ending to Celebration Guns songs rushes over until the last seconds of everyone spelling out the evening light, as they sing out “To love again, or let someone in,” and then it’s all gone.

A Place For Owls picks up directly where Celebration Guns leaves off. Imagine these two bands as next door neighbors in matching homes with inverted color palettes. Celebration Guns turns out the warm light in the window, and A Place For Owls lights up the whole front of their home. Nick Webber on vocals leads the Owls in, with quieted acoustic strums and Jesse Cowan on steady drums to count everyone right through “25.” This song swirls like the cooling of tea in a thin cup. The peaks rise up above the hillside where you can see mountains just past what’s right in front, but Webber, in the uncertain state that seems to follow like a shadow from his own solo album released earlier this year, sings right into the corners where the murkiness of just exactly what is or isn’t going on here unfolds like creased map pages without a final destination.

Ben Sooy then returns to the forefront on “17/24/33,” which is possibly the strongest showing of what A Place For Owls is really capable of. The lead guitar work on this song masters the depths of just how much is possible between Nick Webber and Daniel Perez. It’s a lead line I continually hear in my head all throughout the day. The grandness of this track continues to rise and foam all the way to the last letting go of final moments. The brilliance in lyrics assessing the actual reality of how writing a song works within the bounds of writing this song hits with lines like, “There’s distance between the melody and the memory.” A recognition of working through something into song form, while diligently trying to capture what can return as miry and uncertain. But A Place For Owls has never sounded so certain.

This split works like surgery for both of these bands, carving and forming the most incredible attributes of what both are able to so easily create. A split that leaves a hoping for more, and more, from each band. A highlighting of two bands doing exactly what they’re best at, that needs to be heard.

(Really Rad Records)

OUR RVW: “A tender scramble of objects found in bruised fields, sewn together with fishing line, and simmering in a worn, cast iron pan.”

From the opening paper mâché guitar strums, Celebration Guns sets a tone that breaks apart more than it builds. But not in the way that might sound.

In saying that, let’s first establish, the musicianship and delivery of everything on this EP cuts precisely like a cold blade through the underside of a trout caught in iced river waters. There’s a raw proximity that burns like summer days that feel like the sun is on a string, a radiating balloon around your wrist. No matter how much sunscreen you slather and squirt, the tinge of red on the skin will make its mark and there’s no relief until the dark blankets over the hills and streets and treetops.

But this “breaking apart,” foams and pours from Justin Weir’s mouth, mind, heart as words and melodies gush forward with a terrible honesty that allows for relating in the realities of what gravity can feel like when concrete welcomes knees and bones down onto the lowest point of the landscape.

Weir brushes back any formalities or pretensions in the name of saying, singing, shouting the pained realizations that have formed like a briny crust on the oyster shells of how life can turn out.

The steel and rope bridge Celebration Guns builds over the course of these four tracks, and walks back and forth manically across, creates a tension and space that relentlessly drives from the speedy, impatience of self-discovery as “Dawgy” drives and guts, all the way to the soft-eyed moments of Weir’s voice gently cracking a window in an apartment building, from a while ago, on those in-between oasis landings in, “Existential Love Song.”

What this band accomplishes across 4 songs that collect at the corner of a clean gutter in 14-minutes are as complicated and deserving of deep and deeper listens. To the point that as the final moments of “Wrong Number,” end it’s amazing that it was only 14 minutes.

There’s a lot here.

Musically, all four members show up to wind together in a solidified coating that pillows an earth that could otherwise appear bland, recognized, rewritten. Celebration Guns delivers a shadow on the water that moves in a choppy shape no one has seen before, at least from this angle.

Weir and Christopher Ignacio drive and sketch guitar parts like an M.C. Escher drawing remade out of red and black LEGO blocks, that melt just a little, bend out of the clear and concise angles ridged forms desire. Between road rash strums, and intricate lines, the guitars never let up, can’t let up.

Ryan Miller threads bass parts that work with the guitars, almost as if a bass IS a guitar and not a place holder, as so many basses get left to be in music. Listen to, “Wrong Number,” for just how integral Miller’s low-end mapping is across the entire EP.

Timothy O’Brien keeps pace with all the quick, worried rest of this, drumming like this will be the last four songs he ever gets the chance to play on. From the roll in on “Dawgy,” all the way to the abrupt ending of “Wrong Number,” O’Brien makes sure his band members have all the topography they could need to create, and yell, and develop, and yell, and fall down, and get back up.

At the end of “Dawgy,” Weir growls, “Too bad I pushed everyone away,” and then it just falls off the side, and the song’s over. It’s an interesting introduction to a set of songs that feel like Weir uses words to grab the listener by the collar and force a magnifying in front of himself and his situations so there’s a focal point to all the music swirling and cresting. The character in the story that has something to say, but fights to unravel, while deserving a closer analysis.

The most tangibly real moment comes with the uniquely self-historic, “Too Many Bandifesto,” which finds Weir recounting a string of moments from his first dying star band, all the way to the present, (shout out to the Chinese Stars reference), but it finishes with Weir proclaiming the certainty and necessity of Celebration Guns itself. The lasting impression its leaving on the band as they drive a tribute to the fact that Weir cannot kick himself out of his own band, so he cries, “LET’S NEVER GET SICK OF IT!” It’s a meta moment that sneaks up, and once the realization of what is being sung lands, a brilliant self-celebratory look at how a band, as a friend, neighbor, family member, becomes needed, important, a part of this that they are in turn a part of.

Based on this new EP we also hope this band never gets sick of itself, and continues to deliver the scrambled, “reality under a lens” formation of songs that can be passively put on and played in the background, but deserve to be taken off of the shelf and really analyzed, and recounted, like a trophy that should have the dust kept off of it.

(Really Rad Records)

People say if a bear approaches in the wild, to make yourself as tall and overwhelming as possible. Lift your arms like tremendous claws and scream like you just ate a bald eagle and stole its voice like Ursula’s sea shell.

Nashville, Tennessee’s, Circuit Circuit arrives to devour everything in sight. Guitars and drums, bass and voices collide like a 600 car pile up on a highway made of rotted raspberry gelatin.

Sliding on ice down the street and into the gutter and into the drain down under the roads, and sail through the sewers into the waterfall that drops off to the magma core of the Earth, and take a spear and hurl into the den of lava wolves waiting for you in the very middle.

Right up close like a magnifying glass.

Brooklyn’s Citrus Maxima struggle and strain as the dagger strums of guitars, and patterns of the ever larger drum beat.

There is a concern in the words, and a clarity like waking up early and not needing another second of sleep.

The way the guitars growl like gravel in a shoe, continue to make the song a far greater movement than one single plan and direction.

It’s a short track that plays like exactly what you want to hear.

Cola, one of our favorite bands of the past few years has the Bandcamp handle bandcola.bandcamp.com. Because we love this band so much, and want new Cola music to appear, whenever we type in “bandc” on our computer it takes us to Cola’s page instead of Bandcamp’s homepage. The computer has memorized where the good music is directly.

YESTERDAY, “Keys Down If You Stay,” appeared!

Another cool course in letting guitar chords strum out like haze in the air, while drums like an analogue clock, tick every second into being.

Tim Darcy welcomes back that signature way words drop like blocks of ice in solidifying gelatin. With lines like “I’m a fragrant kind of shadow,” the encoded beauty of capturing things no one else can fully grasp keeps Cola as interesting as ever.

Bass notes turn like a spiral staircase built in a square instead of a circle.

Cola is back!

(Fire Talk Records)

Steel wool and dryer lint burning in a hole dug underground.

Danny Moffat delivers a list of tracks hidden under the haze of smoke coming from the siding of a house where the ground is half mushy water and half street and grass.

Guitars swelter and churn, drums like moving boxes smashing around in the back of a 26 foot truck making its way across a town without any tall buildings.

This is music to listen to when the sun has set, but the sky glows from the day a little still. Everything looks like smoky shapes of what it once was, an hour earlier.

OUR RVW: “A shimmering sword blade, falls from the hilt, landing halfway in a small mound of dirt, rusted by cold rains all season.”

Buried under the surface tension of water in a pot, ready to boil, but the fire isn’t hot just yet.

Cooking slow, cold like hands in November night.

A quilt pulled over but the holes in the stitching breathe like pockets in a microscopic, warm sea.

The Collect Pond, headed up by Danny Moffat, cuts in like a plastic picnic knife, and rolls along with drums covered in off-brand duct tape, and guitars bouncing like a flashlight through empty glass bottles.

Vocally, Moffat directs by following the melody like it’s halfway trapped in quicksand. And that’s a good thing. The level of everything sinks together so a close listen is necessary to truly enjoy the whole of the ripening vegetation on the underside of the leaves, before chewing caterpillars in yellow and black stripes devour.

As the main riff circles around towards the end, Moffat lets the vocals devolve into heavy, swirling effects, that coat like the sheen on a cheap band-aid.

Altogether, The Collect Pond rips right through 2 minutes like a wave that rolls over and breaks on pale sand, and doesn’t even fully sweep the debris on the beach away.

It’s hazy like a closet in an old house, when the lightbulb is more brown than even yellow. Is it a coat? A ghost? A rusted trophy? Maybe just a breeze with a shadow.

(Candlepin Records)

The spindly guitar parts fly by like ninja stars as this band from Donostia, Spain throws and chucks everything in sight at a pace like gazelles branching past the pond full of alligator teeth.

With extended moments of planets all spinning at different axis points and rotation speeds, everything works together.

Weaving, soaring, sorting.

Sparkling clean like bleach gushing down the drain.

(BCore Disc)

A six-piece from Columbus, Ohio delivering tracks pressed like freshly steamed slacks. It’s a box on the front porch full of necessary items, but exciting because it’s something that’s arrived in the mail.

It’s a plastic tray that separates all of the side dishes from the main course. Everything in place to be enjoyed: one exact execution.

A highway that never ends, or at least as long as needed to be driven across the map.

Would it be too much to just say, THIS is what a band should be like. How a band should operate.

(Trouble In Mind Records)

OUR RVW: “A cold can of lost film in the cabinet above the microwave. It’s right behind where the searchers always look for it.”

Movement like moonlight across the stairs over the course of hours.

The steps stay static, awaiting a transport for someone to walk down in the dark, but through the open blinds, the motion of the moon allows for the lines of lunar light to skitter across. Lighting patches, startling mice and ghosts quietly lingering on the flight.

Coral Grief staggers up and down stairs, bending between notes, boiling a subtle fury in the sounds they create on “Copycat,” to leave an imprint on the evening hours, a bruise on an apple, a cloud that turns into a shadow.

Lena FM, vocalist for this trio, sings with the distant sound of someone reading a book while also explaining something to someone in the room, simultaneously.

The notes in the melodies move at times like a steel wave breaking across a cold, northern beach. At times, the words trail up and around the corner of a room, where the ceiling and walls meet. A plant with tentacles overgrowing the pot it started in, and moving above the room to the light fixture.

Sam Fason utilizes the sounds a guitar can make to drive and scratch, while also creating otherworldly terrains, that the motion of the rest of the sounds and singing can march across, like walking quickly over hot coals. Syrupy ponds meld into the blazing hands of the sun.

Cam Hancock, steady, draws all of the bending of light, and movement inside of prisms together to collect the sound inside of a structure that lets each note, and angle breath. A rake removing pond scum and water plants to clarify the very same water.

“Copycat,” rolls like a soft, old towel drawn from the dryer and folded into place in a closet full of items that if sorted through could recollect a whole history.

There is fullness and thinness in the same moments.

There is familiarity and distance in the same moments.

This song sounds like something triggering a memory a brain can only draw pieces of, and then fade. A feeling of nostalgia or an emotion not completely solidified as fact. There’s something dark blue, and pale yellow in the same moments. A green no one has seen until this song.

OUR RVW: “Splinters in the concrete, can’t be extracted, but wear away when the wind runs over them.

Over the past few years, Chicago’s Cusp has been delivering some of the best singles and breadcrumbs of songwriting in quick and fleeting moments.

Suddenly we’ll have a new track, and then they disappear again. Having left another perfect song.

And in these few minutes of new music, Cusp developed some of the best sounding instrumentals layered under Jen Bender’s sharp ability to sing exactly into the moment of every second, while writing the catchiest melodies to only boost these songs beyond anything else in the scope of new music going on around.

But now, we have a full length from Cusp.

“You Can Do It All,” which feels like an aptly titled message to the band itself.

This album is the sound of a healing scar. Or at least it seems to be healing.

The sound of an empty room that still needs to be rearranged. Or at least the furniture is moved in, but will it stay?

With guitars meandering in between straight forward lead lines and strums that make the whole feeling a little sea sick, Cusp delivers track after track somewhere between kindling on fire, and a blister that only seems to be weathering a little more. A bruise changing color, but not fading.

From the onset of “Ok,” Cusp trails in on a piano from a haunted backroom, before the severity of early morning anxieties wake up to a sun that’s more browned than bright.

“Dead Things Talk,” stair steps in classic Cusp fashion, writing into that exactly written guitar line, a razor through glass, rising to the cresting wave of “Limited Edition.” A track that floats like a cloud. But if you google “how heavy is a cloud?” you get back, “about 1 billion 400 million pounds.” This song floats like a 1 billion pound cloud, riding the bumps and ridges of a dry riverbed. The weight of the sky bearing down like a claw moving from the breathlessness of atmosphere to the unforgiving reality of gravity.

Where past singles zoomed everything right into the forefront, and the greatest strengths of Cusp displayed like a quick exhibit, (see “Win,”) an entirety of Cusp’s time and ability to develop the whole picture shows much more to a band that can seemingly rifle off perfection in a single song. There’s time to break a mirror and still look into it, find what reflects best and leave some of the fragments anyways.

With unsettling systems of cactus needle guitar work, and desert animal roughness in the tones, the shifting through of weird dreams, and fragmented streets sounds like changing channels on an upside down television. But none of the shows are making sense. At least to the logic you’re expecting.

Cusp writes in spindles and angles that leave the terrain uneven, but there are places to step over to get to steadier footing. “My Two Cents,” trips over itself like the faller is in on the joke, but then there’s the melodies and interludes that glide past like swans on a projection, waving across a sheet in a backyard near your house.

It’s the give and take of a spider web in the chimney, and a fire burning to keep the house warm beneath. At some point those tiny, silk strands will slip away from the bricks, it’s just not right now.

Cusp crosses through 10 tracks like an open field of fresh snow, and the footprints that follow the walker never melt, never sink to the ground fully. There’s a lightness to the depths, and discomfort in the seemingly unconcerned, of the sounds being just what they need to be, to fully be.

With every steady AND shaky part connected to the next, Cusp’s ominous tone, tiptoes around what sounds lighter than it actually might be.

By the time “The Hum,” strums past, like a hoof near a volcano, the disoriented state of this entire list of songs will leave a need for more listens. More understanding where things won’t ever be quite spelled out.

The title of the album juxtaposed against track 5 creates the space where Cusp creates. There’s a way Bender and Gaelen Bates strum away like it matters, or not. There’s a shrug in the singing, while peering through a scope on EXACTLY what needs to be sung. It’s an exercise in precision and overheating the thermostat for the sake of raising the temperature just to see what happens.

It's an album that sounds like knowing and not knowing, dreaming and staying awake for a week straight, and everything in between no one ever realizes is also unraveling and folding up.

Cusp is one of our favorite bands.

Every so often, this Chicago band appears with a new single, and every time, it’s the best song we’ve heard in a while.

Jen Bender sings strong melodies over the excellently crafted sounds the whole of this band put together. It chimes and it haunts like a cloud in the shape of a navy blue hand.

It’s the dark corner of the street where an animal out of habitat is standing on the sidewalk trying to figure out how to get back home.

Cusp songs end quickly. No time to settle in. Listen to the new moments, and then gone again.

OUR RVW: “Sun setting in the reflection of a window, etches the scene forever, a sketch no one drew.”

The microscopic details of events and wrinkles etched into the shrunken lines on a stamp, multiply by the amount of tiny, rectangular places and spaces collected under polished glass. A collection of images small enough to miss, but massive in the intricacies. Collections of locations, faces, characters, and endless streams of historical moments, seem so minimized in the tiny frames of a glorified sticker that pays for a letter to travel from here to there, and there back to here.

But the art, the focus, the impressions inside of the tiny sketches are brimming with color and line.

Vermont’s, Dari Bay, delivers 10 songs on new album, “Longest Day of the Year,” in a similar fashion. These squared up meals of sound could pass like the gust of wind that whips up chimes and material on chairs for a quick moment, before the stagnation of summer afternoon takes its place again. Even the title, “Longest Day of the Year,” the outstretched arm of the center of 365 days grouped together.

Warm sun and fence lines out past the view finder, go on as the light waits the night out for as long as it possibly can. See these tracks as moments all in that same day. See these songs as 10 stamps, holding moments, details, words spoken that pop like bubbles, but linger in memory.

Zack James, songwriter and mind behind Dari Bay, crafts a stack of sounds somewhere between a deep breath at the edge of the sea, and a covered porch facing a creek where the trees tangle thick, allowing for nocturnal animals to rest and move as the sun sets without being noticed.

Where trails of pale smoke rise off the top of guitars, leading the majority of these easy sounding moments, deeper, the sounds and words mold somewhere and something tangibly relatable, as it drifts just out of reach. The way the moon can light a room, but hanging way up there, it still feels like a source of light we can’t grasp fully.

The album breaks up into different portions of the same developed sound. Where a track like, “Circle of Birds,” floats downward like a crown dropping from a tree onto the surface tension of a grouped up pond, “Walk on Down,” approaches like passing through a door to a cavernous room full of dusty trophies, and old hand tools waiting to ever be picked up again.

On closer, “Stay Awake,” James sings, “I’m in love with having fun,” a concept on an album that appears and disappears in the perimeters of wrestling through HOW MUCH fun can be had while giving way to directness, to keep a congruent shape without letting loose and losing the control of these palettes.

With electric guitar driving the majority of place and space, these sounds are rounded out with pedal steel, banjo, Wurlitzer, and other familiarity sculpted in ways that wash the directive with sprinkles of interest. Keeping the water wheel supplying, while birds sit on the edges to see how long they can wait to flap their wings.

James’s guitar work, underrated, works like slight of hand tricks, where the lines work so well, the listener may miss just how perfectly developed each part really is. “River,” descends and passes by, builds on itself, and attaches perfection in working in certain boundaries, without even passing 2 minutes.

Dari Bay stretches out short moments into songs to continually return to, not entirely to discover something new with each listen, but to relive the moments when the sun was shining just right, and the weather passed without notice, and something unsaid felt just right to stand there and look at everything.

This album holds all it needs the way a classic family photograph brings the same smile to every similar looking face, and there isn’t even a way to describe why the memory on the shiny paper is so overarchingly good.

Dave Scanlon picks guitar strings like tea cups stacking and falling and stacking back up.

Scanlon sings like calling out into a cave is the only way to find a way.

The magical borders sparkling on the edges of these tracks stick like paper stars in the coat of the family dog.

The words fit when Scanlon sings, “I’m only details, I’m only ornaments,” as the chords momentarily descend into everywhere.

This is music to light the great hall and chambers.

These are songs to fold into a note that’s already in your pocket book.

Drifting in between buildings that will stand throughout time.

Take them with you.

(Whatever’s Clever)

Patrick Wade delivers vocals like a curl of smoke turning in sunlight through a window that needs to be rinsed from the outside. The dust and haze of the winter holds like a prism in the hand of a sunbeam.

Here the bass lines slide, cool snakes in cooler grass.

String strikes and malted moments develop something like opening a china cabinet and bringing out the knick knacks and painted plates that never get used. Or even remembered.

The lyrics layer and rise like foam out of a volcano full of dish soap. Frothing into landslides of soft, translucent spheres.

Horn blasts, hand claps, the warmth of the evening collected in a net and set on fire.

(Bastard Jazz)

Melbourne, Australia’s Deuce cuts out 10 tracks on a curt, exact line of sounds and textures.

Deuce arrive with guitars that jump and bounce like moonlight through a line of trees off the side of the highway.

Keyboards and crisp-as-an-apple drum beats coat melodies that shout like a nest full of fresh cracked eggs.

It’s a quiet get together that becomes a party as neighbors and friends get invited in.

With different voices carrying lead duties, Deuce writes track after track that don’t let down.

Extremely well crafted songs with nothing extra, just exactly what needs to map out between tracks to give every song its own face and life, while keeping a thread that makes this sound continually needed.

Opener “Fall Apart” reveals all a listener would need to recognize what’s to come, and it’s an album everyone should listen to, and then listen to again.

(Dinosaur City Records)

The underside of a leaf where the little bugs live and survive.

Cold calls in the middle of the night from an area code that doesn't spell out in numerical display.

Somewhere where things don’t fully appear in mirrors. Where collisions of concept devour the pretension of understanding clarity and everything crunches together in a trash compactor.

It’s a place where sound and space condense into weather systems no one could have expected because weather like this has never happened.

Instrumentation and strong drums work without words to give a completely different angle on a room you have looked into before. But the doorway always moves.

Scanning through the dictionary, discovering descriptive words for places and items unknown.

The surface of a distant moon isn’t sand or dust, but it isn’t quite water either.

The flick of a lighter to outline the old furniture in the abandoned building.

Beats crack like fossils restructuring into place. Bone animals on the ridge, where the sunset can peak through the ribcage of a skeletal giant blocking the clouds in the shape of plates and cups.

Found some small pieces of soft kick and crisp snare. Measures in increments like inchworms traveling the perimeter of a subtle tea cup.

Cool collections like spring leaves and autumn leaves taped to the same paper plate.

An ant with numb jaws climbing a stalk like a human taking the stairs up a tower.

OUR RVW: ““An attempt at covering an abandoned vehicle with tin foil, right before the heaviness of snow falls overnight.”

The cold blue, the center vein of a block of ice.

A specter’s hand appearing from behind the curtain.

Winter chill, moving past the sawdust and crack in the side of the cabin, presses past the dinner table like a thread unwilling to snap.

There’s barely anything left in the tall glass, a bit of water at the bottom, swirled like a tempest without a fever.

DM Stith returns this year with a new full-length, which is the wonderful news over at Small Albums Headquarters. Leading to the whole of Stith’s certain way of crafting and creating tracks in a sieve full of pond water and bits of gold, silver and lunar rock. These songs are teeming with tiny crags where tinier misshapen creatures from the deepest shallows of tide pools reside. Tangible direct layers of sound, that must be shoveled up to unveil what resides under the surface.

Stith writes like no one else. The sleepy tones of acoustic guitar slumbering outside of a house that’s missing a patch of roof. Vocals that double and triple like a shadow following down the side of an abandoned main street. Choirs of sea water and sunken ships rising from tides struck by lightning bolts with one eye.

On new single, “Greyhounds,” Stith “shouldn’t be here.” A low-level panic seems to be nipping at the heels of shoes trying to shuffle gravel pathways out of the way to run from wherever this desperation is folding like meringue that’s turned sour. Peaks and drips, but tinted with the pale gathering at the corners of mouths, smacking of certain sickness.

Stith continually cries, “flashing your gang signs at the moon.” An accusation toward another in the area we never get a direct view of.

It’s the inner workings of a songwriter that masterfully paints a corner of a story without a direct beginning or end, but that hasn’t ever been the point. With the trademarked acoustic dribbling down the sides of a barren well, the swells of background vocals howling like a dagger in the wind, Stith is bracing against, keep peaking around branches and bark, while this “lapse in the park,” devours the voice trying desperately to spell out what is not so right about this lonely experience.

It's the surprise in a homemade magic trick where you know some slight of hand just occurred, but how exactly really is a mystery. It’s the confusion of what gang sign is being revealed, and why the moon is the one to view it.

The heavy discomfort of not getting enough sleep because the full light of the moon bleaches your bedframe and comforter and keeps getting in your eyes, no matter which way you toss or turn.

(Historical Fiction Records)

Look at the fire burning. Stare into the lapping of the tall orange spikes eating up the oxygen.

Then look directly up into the night and see the imprint of those orange hands rising in ghost shadows up and out, between stars. Between pine branches. Between it all.

Acoustic brushes like snow falling from spring branches on the walking trail out past the city.

The places where lights in old homes can be seen across the valley.

A place to look and watch. A place to unspool the threads that got pulled too tightly.

(WarHen Records)

Richmond, Virginia’s, Downhaul, precedes anything new they’d release, due to the strength of their history.

A band that cuts like a rusted blade through a sheet of rain. There’s a grandness to the loose pain rattling in the background of the big guitars and drums that consistently sound like everything.

It’s a band that knows necessity and grandeur and lands the sound somewhere between a trophy case and a handful of cold water.

On these four new tracks, Downhaul, sears with the venom of a purpose needed to be said, while wrapping each moment in gentleness of a wind that won’t lift a petal from a flower in the yard.

From the blasting guitar solo on opener “Fracture,” to the momentary quiet of the intro to “Sink,” Downhaul spans their entire sound in the midst of only four songs.

This feels like a collection of short stories, where the same characters appear in different settings and eras, but with completely unique narratives, that tie together through nods and hints.

OUR RVW: “Stair steps up out of mid-morning, tall grass, and up to a platform in the air, where every direction is possible to look at.”

Something I see from time to time that feels really self-important, is the music-writer-move to tweet out some coded statement like, “I just heard something you haven’t heard yet, it’s going to be the album of the year.” No one ever has a clue obviously, and it drips with self-congratulatory tone that feels nebulous and not as impressive as intended. So, in what I am about to say, I say as a fan of this band, and a recognition that what we have here is the start of something really exciting, not that I got to hear it early, just that I’ve been genuinely excited to get to write this review!

A few weeks back, Downhaul sent us an email with a link to listen to, “The Riverboat,” leading up to its release. Based on how much we enjoyed, “Proof,” Downhaul’s extremely great 2021 album, seeing an email from Downhaul at all was exciting enough, but then we played this track.

And then we played it again.

And then we played it again.

And then we emailed Downhaul back TWICE to make sure they knew just how good this new single is.

This right here is a template of how a band should make a return.

There’s something immediate about, “The Riverboat,” that discourages any analysis of what came before and how it measures up, and rather pushes what worked well before, into a fresh zone, a place to capture ears and attention all on its own. It’s like hearing an echo as a completely new color appears. Seeing a photograph of a moment worth remembering, while the best of life is unfolding in this room right here.

“The Riverboat,” works like a glimmering, high-peaked pyramid. Leading in with that passing-cloud drum beat, that will also be the last thing hear at the end. From there Downhaul hides wrapped packages of guitar parts, vocal moves, and peaks and valleys, like carved out imagery of dust and silt, steel beams, and walking through a door to a warm home.

Right about 1:23 the song heats up with some of the best guitar work I’ve heard in a long time. It’s quick, it’s perfect, and it leads to this shifting, sliding, lifting and rising, that comes out of the tunnel right after the 2 minute mark with heavy handed strums as Gordon Phillips calls out over the falling rocks and ice, the rest of the band continually maps out. It’s a deluge of tectonic plates moving out of place, or into place, like an adjustment to the entire planet’s spinal cord.

Phillips sings, “Nobody’s perfect, so turn it around,” as the band moves out into the openness of land again. A fresh breath on the other side of the weight of barnacled sheet metal. Where fences are built that mean nothing, because everything living out in these pastures can grow and move freely.

The surgical precision of Downhaul’s song crafting abilities in specifically unique parts all pieced together without feeling “Frankensteined,” is a feat worth celebrating. It’s a work of art. With so much richness in measuring out how best to utilize the drum beat, the soaring bird guitars, the heaving boulder guitars, the bass that moves like moles under the crust of the Earth, following along with some sort of sixth sense ability to mimic what’s occurring up in the air. Downhaul works like a singular organism with multiple sets of vision and understanding to combine into this rising pyre of leaving what already worked well as a band, and developing forward in a direction and sound closer and closer to the peaks of possibility.

There’s enough here, on this one song, to come back to, again and again, to grasp and grab onto, to work to understand and learn from a band with a direct path that I hope only leads to more of where it sounds like Downhaul is headed.

Insects developed inside of a scanner, sending messages through the wires they crawl across.

Voices like hummingbirds knocking on front doors looking for flowers without faces.

A raindrop on a leaf that quenches the thirst of a colony of rodents too minor to observe.

The thought process of a water bear.

The signature of a moss piglet.

The existence of a tardigrade for one day. No perception of sunrise, sunset, digital clock. So just how long is the day?

(Hausu Mountain)

There’s a sludge in the lawn that’s making the yard look like midnight, but it’s autumn, 2:00pm.

There’s a consistency in dweller.’s approach to these songs that creep along like purple vines on the brick on the back of a cottage.

It’s some artifact standing in a field where nothing else lasted.

A rock slide edging closer to storming down the side with every gust, every uneven footstep.

Depth never lacks here. The guitars dive like a crane for a fish that was never there.

Spiraling down a drain looking for clean water.

(We’re Trying Records)

Here is a map covered in moss and sea grass.

Here is a footprint on the sand made by the moon.

Here is a wind chime on the back of a bike, riding over slight dirt hills on a path to a doorway in a mountain.

Here is an animal bone that proves the existence of a mythical creature.

Here is a snow cap lifting off of the top of a peak and floating like a Christmas ornament in the middle of a cloudless sky.

Diamonds and pearls laced like a beam of sun on a river.

(Métron Records)

Mysteriously developed, this self-proclaimed “amateur music producer,” trails blocky instruments in the lines and shapes of cows on a hillside in 3-D animation, but the shape and form consists of cubed angles.

Get lost in a back alley full of bubbling, now defunct branded soda on “Pipin’ Hot Keys.”

There’s a quiet rest in the way the synthetic washes of sound coat the background of the tracks, while robotic drums and chiming melodies plaster the walls.

It’s a haunted house in the middle of the day, after the season has ended.

There’s a sense of consistent keyboard excursions, like shrinking and sailing through the home aquarium in a toy submarine.

Journey through “Glimmers of the Abyss,” as the fatherly bass line detects every detail in the garage before closing up for the night.

A splendid excursion through the applications on your old, desktop computer in the family home.

(Nostalgix)

Summer clouds brought together like a bouquet in the center city fountain. Water babbling, pieces of the sky, heavy with soaked wool arms, and continuing to draw it all in.

It’s a 2-Liter of lemon lime soda overgrowing from the cap like vines behind the old house. Spilling and shouting in the heat of the orange afternoon sun.

Shimmering like fish skin, Eggs on Mars calls out from behind thin masks to make sure everything really gets a chance to be witnessed for exactly what it is.

A Kansas City album dripping with voices singing from inside a brand new cave, guitars strumming like rivers all collecting in the same tributary.

“Tempered modeling clay in the shapes of seashells, stuck along the sides of a cartoonishly colored apartment building on the wharf.”

Something like the turning plume of the gentle flame on a cake’s candle rolling past the eyes of a house cat, sitting closer to the cake than wanted. The slow burn dripping coral colored wax into the white icing, like rain that dives below the asphalt.

The slowness of analogue clock hands ticking past the minute marks to build an entirety of a day. Every second clicking itself by with the tiny sound of the hand directing another micro lifetime in the breath of an insect, the single chirp of a bird.

A bird will call out and we’ll hear it, and we’ll forget about it. But it meant something that singular time. Every time.

En Attendant Ana, a five-piece band from Paris, France, play music in the vein of sitting in the summer sun when the afternoon has nothing scheduled and the warmth turns to whispering heat, making it difficult to get back up and get going. There’s a gentleness, casual in breezing by, but every note, melody line, drum beat cuts cloth exactly into shapes we can identify, enjoy, look for more.

With a handful of cool birdbath water, these songs play like early mornings, and evenings after a perfectly developed day closes down. Balanced exactly between hot coffee and cool, iced endings.

From the kic- off of “Principia,” one of our favorite singles we’ve heard this year, the album untethers into a lake that gets to be titled a “sea,” and every single song sounds perfectly wrapped in wallpaper, and crisp corners of rooms individual and breathing.

Margaux Bouchaudon leads the band with vocals developed in the mundane of details that piece life together, but with the gentle, candied corners of something baked with the crust collecting along the sides in extra, rather than lack.

With a team of guitar, bass and drums, the music forms ridged like an ice cube tray in the shapes of geese, and ice skates, and sand colored libraries. Everything gets played rightly to Adrien Pollin’s drumming that slices in exact beats like a scalpel along a wall made of thick plastic. Direct lines cut through the instrumentation to make sure all of this band moves together. “Black Morning,” exemplifies a call and response vocal, catching the ear, while Pollin directs and drives, not distracted by anything else unfolding.

The guitar work is quiet, understated, but excelling in leading and driving parts and hooks that make these songs continually some of the catchiest, and best written of 2023. Max Tomasso works in moments like the walking down ease on “Ada, Mary Diane,” as the ending nears, and the song peaks a little higher. See also the long chords picked out on “The Fears, The Urge.” Every guitar part decorated with the ornaments of bass lines and parts handily delivered by Vincent Hivert. Used as an instrument, not just a floor, Hivert moves and shifts along with the band. The bass always there to help travel just how it’s needed. “Wonder,” a STAND OUT track, allows Hivert the easy subtlety to help create the moment, the tone, so when the introductory lowlands change to the speedy second half, the bass is there and maybe you don’t even realize it. Then when Tomasso picks the notes out to speed things up, Hivert’s already quietly driving it all through the night.

Finally, as En Attendant Ana describes, Camille Frechou, their “Secret Weapon,” appears and disappears throughout on trumpet and saxophone. It’s never there just to have a horn on the song, the parts and moments are exactly what is needed. See, “Fools and Kings,” for tiny corners around the room lighting up. Frechou blasts out parts that help this understated band appear in all of the golden rimmed cloud and sparkle of what this really is.

This is a band that has exactly the menu and recipe book to be great. To make music in a pattern they keep cutting, and it always works. Easily one of the best albums of 2023.

(Trouble In Mind Records)

OUR RVW: “Chains of flowering vines, resurfacing the place where the fence wore out last summer from a rain that fell stronger than they said it could.”

Something familiar, like rounding the corner to the kitchen, and oven mitted hands and warm kettles greet your returning home.

Something uncertain, the sun staying high in the sky longer than expected. Forecasts and reports passed by, and the warmth and the heat spell a day no one lived until now.

Enough occurs here on this lead single of En Attendant Ana’s forthcoming album to impress, and wind around and around, to create a place that captures something certain, while allowing the edge of this song to slide like spider’s silk bordering metallic items, not made to grasp the webbed home of eight-legged sneaking creatures. But the metal and the spider’s sticking inhabitation become a newness, a development, a suburb between nature and progress. Spiders have never developed something past the web they were programmed to create.

From Paris, this band waves with one hand, while holding onto the railing, lining the top of a large boat, as they sail out to where the gold glitter of sun reflections swim inside of far-away waves.

Max Tomasso creates a looping reality of a guitar part that arrives on continual time, an invisible train slipping between the house you grew up in, and a brand new condominium that rises up into the clouds, and no one has ever seen the top. As the song progresses, the other, far louder guitars pull chairs right up to the front and press fingerprints across the glass, while drawing curtains three quarters of the way across the view, so the listener only sees what can be provided here.

Margaux Bouchaudon sings over the layered cake of instrumentation, every ingredient built and mixed to invite melody to thread words like, “And what direction would I walk, would I be circling? Staying in one parallel line so that we’d never meet.” The seeking for direction seems obtuse in the center of a song that has been developed to know exactly what the measurements and meters of parts and pieces have to be, to gain this overflowing surface tension.

“Principia” is built on nothing being overwritten, over developed, over ripened. The main guitar turn that continues angling back and forth throughout the song, backed by Antione Vaugelade’s steady handed drumming. The subtlety of the terrain the beat creates around doesn’t move much, but listen closer and it’s obvious Vaugelade takes seriously the role of direction, but from a high up control tower.

When the song passes half of the way through, and the guitars start working together a little louder, little more, and Bouchaudon begins singing more elongated notes, and something feeds back just a bit and keeps rolling across the sides like cloth out the window of a car on a main road, the swirl rises to somewhere, and the only thing to do is follow the noises. The map keeps getting traced and retraced, and then when the end comes the whole of what has been written into every second feels exactly like it should. There’s a defined purpose to completing the song with intention while leaving everything just a little loose.

There’s room inside of the air-tight tomb of the main guitar, drawing the sketch, and then the band fills every space up with measured intention, and it feels like a perfectly completed way to introduce a new album.

(Trouble In Mind)

A thoroughly picked set of acoustic guitar strings, shimmer past like translucent bird wings, accompanied by an austere voice reflecting and committing into the place of allowing the newness to matter.

There’s a continual trail to walk through where fog hangs on pine branches like ornaments.

It’s a patterned creation that eventually opens up into the edge of the ground to the space beyond.

The picking slows to quiet strums, but the thread of connecting between this committal to the entirety of everything connecting grows like a plant that gets too big for its pot in the corner of the living room.

The guitar strings float out of the song like tiny apples not fully formed, but picked and sweet like bigger spheres.

Reds and greens in a tale being told that’s a memory, it’s a lesson, it’s right here and now and then and there.

It travels and moves like paper wings and paper letters glued to paper cards.

Flasher, a duo from Washington D.C., has leased us four more tracks on this new EP that gleam like a diamond mine exploding along the side of the highway.

It’s busy and moving like wind through plants.

It’s tangles of exact details in the lyrics with guitars and keyboards trickling like a tiny backyard tributary of sprinklers and a creek meeting to make a little pond where paper boats and bird feet can splash above dried pine needles.

It’s opening a window on a hot day and the street below bubbling with people and cars and grocery bags almost bursting all collect like a cloud of bright sound.

Emma Baker and Taylor Mulitz work in a unique vastness and needled detail like looking at a wide open field through a microscope.

(Domino Recording Co)

In 2022 Dylan MacDonald released this self-titled album with production and songs that boosted to the top of sounds we loved. “Leave You Lonely” was one of the best songs we heard all year.

But did you listen?

Good news, Field Guide retraced the outlines of these songs in a hushed, descending style that exemplifies the brittle bones of just how gifted MacDonald is at songwriting, and not just good sounds.

So here is a second chance to listen. Start here. Familiarize your life with the grey sun on the horizon.

Then go back and listen to the other version, with plants in pots on the window sills, and glasses half full of water on the tray in the solarium.

We tried to tell you.

Aaron Powell, a singular songwriter in our time appears and reappears, disappears and redisappears like translucent mollusks in freezing tide pools.

The hand of a ghost on a piano that won’t stop chiming a chord with one note that hits off on purpose. To chill down like the tide waters.

I don’t know if I missed any announcement, but Fog Lake releasing music is a holiday in my life. “Midnight Society,” yet again, delivers a list of some of the best written songs of 2023. With the fuzz and haze of the bandages the production I wrapped in, the scarred guitars and bass crumble under the pressure of Powell’s trademark vocal delivery. A voice curling at the height of the room, like old smoke with concern in its burning eyes.

There’s so much here. It’s an album to make a plan to listen to, and not have other plans to go with it. It’s a book, it’s a film, it’s an album, it’s necessary.

If the seascape pieces together like puzzle piece shapes into a new land, an aquatic Pangaea, this is the sound of the sculpting and forming.

The dying of a star that flares out over the collection, falling into the warm waters like sea shells of new ilk on a griddle of atmosphere that can’t be breathed.

The winding and ticking by like a clock on the deck of a sleepy boat.

Keyboards bend into time beyond 24 hours.

FitzGerald sings over the frosting layers of the synthetic wilderness to match the beats under the surface that drain like a tributary into the core of an Earth much like this one.

(Domino Recording Co.)

Growing and pacing, Greg Foat and Gigi Masin let tracks expand and grow like how slow we’re all supposed to chew a bite of food. There’s no rushing in the way the keys move around like flashlights across a field.

Basslines glide the way sunlight breaks over waves of water.

Everything builds together. Watching a skyscraper appear as cranes pile and sort.

Doors open and doors close. Summer air collides with the frigid conditioning of the air blasting out of the entrances and exits at the big box stores.

There’s a sliding like a sidewinder on warmed sands.

It’s themes and rhythms, expanded plains, and flights across town.

(Strut Records)

There was a trend going around that was like “an album cover that sounds exactly like the album,” and here it is.

Catch these two skiing through the saxophones and bouncing keys of long pastures of growing hills.

Watch as the evolution of beginnings become the endings of far away.

Harp strings like shakes of snow sprinkling on warm toast. Move to strums of classical guitar and then outer space density.

Find much in the continual developments across these six tracks.

A winter swirl/an igloo with electricity/an ice cream cone with a town inside.

(Athens of the North)

OUR RVW: “Samples on the table, no one taking anything in the folded-up paper cups.

Draw the shades in the dark afternoon light.

The same crinkle of the tiny food platters, grips the window’s edges so no one can see the pathetic rainstorm.”

To unspool a tiny, pale blue thread through a needle and patch up the tear is intricate in focus, intricate in detail.

To paint a sun landing at the end of the day, is intricate in color. Not just blotches of yellow, but the degrading warmth in tone and temper.

Greg Mendez doesn’t dump an entire toolbox on the table. Mendez doesn’t script out everything ever needed to get the point across.

The chorus of “Clearer Picture (of You),” defines the notion of exactness in Mendez’s work across this album. The definitions aren’t splashy and overwrought. It’s the drained face in the mirror of experiencing some strange/hurtful/hollow/meandering moments, and having to still clean up at the end of the day.

With a voice wavering like the flame on a scentless candle, wax set in some dark forest green or worried red, moving with the motion of the offshoot of a gust of wind through a dingy, open window screen.

Accompanied by an acoustic guitar that cuts clean like glasses of water on a tray to be taken outside to warm people, and yet with bits of the humanity of playing an instrument genuinely, buzzes and try again. See the end of “Clearer Picture,” or the beginning of “Hoping You’re Doing Okay.”

After the dirge of “Best Behavior,” Mendez singing alongside the picked notes like two different types of birds with feet walking along the same powerline. How do birds do that? How do they step across cables and wires surging with electric strength that could seemingly blast them into the heavens?

At the end of “Best Behavior,” there’s this picked out chaotic moment where Mendez plucks and speeds past the end of the song. And it makes sense to end it that way. Not sure why, but there’s something that’s needed to get out of the last moments of a song that starts with the most real, and unfriendly line, “You got the radio playing and all I can think is to change it.”

It's this loose willingness to spell out the far away parts of the most real words and thoughts we all say and think. Mendez doesn’t shy away from the fact that being a human has to be captured in real chunks of cutting to the center of a piece of fruit. Seeds can escape and eventually get themselves planted, I guess, but wouldn’t it help if we pushed them down into the dirt? Planting is like an organic lottery. A gambling in the garden. What will arrive and sprout, what will wither and die? What never emerges?

Mendez seems to very willingly, (quietly,) but willingly press seeds into plastic cups full of yesterday’s dirt, and watch what waters and writhes up out of the shaping of moments and miraculously simple places feet can walk.

This album never overextends itself, nor does it attempt anything outside of the real possibilities of what’s attainable with a simple set up, and a mind in Mendez that views everything with a perspective and singing voice that can outline the invisible parts of a day that no one else is watching for, or was able to capture first.

It's a 23 minute album that extends a lifetime into something relatable, and mysteriously all itself.

Passages from a book left on the side of a recycling bin. Someone can read it, or an animal will use it to fortify some homemade nest or cavern.

(Forged Artifacts/Devil Town Tapes)

Where a factory erupts in fire, but everything keeps moving, business as usual. The blaze ignites more materials, and there isn’t time to even grab an overcoat when the people realize they finally have to get out. Grocer balances the overheated and strained, with angles and directions not on a map, not accessible by foot. Floating and digging, fighting, and pointing, but where are shoes thick enough to walk across magma in a cavern that’s caving in.

(Grind Select)

OUR RVW: “Deer stand in cold grass, chewing, staring. An owl shifts on a tree branch somewhere nearby, startling itself as wings flap past green stained hooves now bolting for the top of a hill.

Colors like magenta, chartreuse, and aquamarine develop as standards to a point, but the identification of just which hue makes these colors exact can be difficult to pin down. Magenta implodes into a deep pink without much of a shift in the addition or subtraction of a tint here or a little more red there. The eye can stumble to recognize just what is and is not, but the steady concept is right before the view, and the color itself knows when it’s coating and combing over a plane.

Picture a large rectangular, magenta plane jutting from clouds, hanging like a geometric landscape of raspberry ice over a neighborhood. That’s the sound, the low hanging, blurry eyed swirl of Growing Pains’ new single, “What Are The Odds?”

It’s a sound that appears on a color wheel somewhere nearing a color like teal, but could also land on a dark blue, or maybe a mint green. The layers that stack to develop the exactness of hue collect in a net rather than on a wall.

A breathing creature with expanding lungs.

With a dry hum and plodding introduction the electric guitar whirls just a little as the notes picked out envelope like a thick, fluffed cloud that isn’t moving on any time soon.

With what sounds like some malleted notes gleaming on the surface of graying snow, the instrumental that grows with murmuring voices and drums coming alive, guitars intertwining, the ghostly stillness drives head first into a hedge along the yard that becomes the driving pace of the rest of the song.

As the first verse reveals a wave rising out of asphalt before quietly, calming into the gentle hook of the chorus, the dynamic and realization of movement in ebb and flow directs a listen that will bound to be repeated.

The lyrics create a vortex of missing someone, or at least searching for them, as the character seems difficult to pin down, but there’s a gentle pleading for staying.

Much like this song, the movement allows for moments of resting on a part, a harmony so good you don’t want it to end, but Growing Pains moves on to more.

Where a song like this could reverse back and forth between verse and chorus and be just fine, this band chooses to continue developing parts and sounds, so the listener has an extended journey to follow, not settle on.

For every weaving chorus, sprinting verse, or guitar part that moves from low to high, and back again, everything appears necessary, reappears, and disappears, just like the focus of the song. The bleeding of color to pale a patch of chartreuse back into yellow, back into sunlight through a tiny diamond.

When the song ends, after the big build and run, there’s an open-endedness that something this perfectly crafted, and quickly moved past is over, and there’s nothing to follow it up. A stand-alone moment, that needs repeating to try to solidify what it is you just heard. Was it a pattern? Was it coral? Or is that just orange?

OUR RVW: “The side of the valley, charged with wild flower blooms, like a copper plate on the fire delivering a near feast.”

Helena Deland holds a place in song crafting that shimmers the same way the scales of a trout move like translucent color swatches under the bending of river water.

The gem set into the cave wall, giving a bit of gleam if you look in the right lighting.

“Spring Bug,” steps with padded feet, and a ribbon of acoustic guitar displayed up above the room as sparkling puzzle pieces constructing themselves into a portrait, the same as yours in the mirror.

The chords have a momentary bend as they pass by. Subtle as a flower bud unfolded into initial petals. The blooming of this song sounds as miraculous and normal as a garden bean stretching from the vine out to full fruit.

Montreal’s Deland carries any song with the strength of a voice that never overshadows the entirety of the plate delivered, but ripples over the top of the song as a fin slices the air and the water in that place where the two meet.

Francis Ledoux on drums holds a steady corral for the rest of the sound to live, organically. The beat stays where it’s needed, and points like a weathervane in the direction where clouds are collecting, or dissipating, depending on where you are standing geographically.

Alexandre Larin and Deland share guitar duties and the glass beads on strings hang down in the doorway as acoustic flourishes and easy patterns that lay out like a blanket on a hill of sun.

Larin’s bass work in the center of the song boosts the song from a quiet open window, to the entire pasture. And then it’s gone. The pasture folds up and it’s a picture in your hand.

Deland sings, “Run down the same streets/I did last time it bit me/And time would act all funny/And I’d stand so still.” There’s something simple about the majority of the arrangement keeping consistency throughout the song, but Deland carries the melody in such a way that the itch of this Spring Bug bite works in the same contagious way of following the song to the very end.

(Luminelle Records)

Randomly, I found a Hidden Eyes single a while back on Bandcamp and it was one of the best songs I had heard in a while.

Then suddenly this band I newly REALLY enjoy released a full length full of murky and fuzz and fairy garden vocals.

A combination plate of char and lightly boiled, bright colors.

An aisle in the store where collections of items all pile together. The necessities no one realizes until you walk down it.

Holiday Ghosts breeze in like a beach in the middle of the night. Warm air, and cool surf pressing along the coastline, while depositing crustaceans with quiet claws ready to SNAP!

Vocals, like shadowy, purple icing, layering along thin-cake guitars bouncing off spray painted basement walls, and brown rugs resting on cold cement.

“Vulture” peaks around, like the bird itself, watching for something to soar to, silent as a spy.

(FatCat Records)

OUR RVW: “The lines from the light traced on the shallower side of a rectangular pool.”

Hurry, one of the best bands in the world, is BACK!

There is a lot to talk about when it comes to Hurry’s continual excellence in songwriting and music releases. Matt Scottoline writes melodies and hooks like an infinity pool. Every song speeds past anything else to listen to, because every part sticks, and will play back whether the song is actually on or not. The melodies are exact, precise, perfect.

The music parallels the melodies with easy strums and beats like casual Friday. Nothing gets overplayed, or even stretches past the moment. It is all needed.

Here on “Beggin’ For You,” Hurry balances instrumental parts that work so well, this track as an instrumental would rule. But add in the chorus melody, the verse melody, any and all of it, and we have a true gift from Hurry here in the Summer of 2023.

The brilliance of Hurry’s song crafting is that heading into a new song, there’s an expectation of what will unfold, and Hurry delivers while never carbon copying something already in the repertoire. This new slice of Hurry sounds refreshed and familiar in perfect balance. It’s a song that stretches like a sunrise and a sunset rising and falling on polar opposite sides of the same shimmering landscape, at the shimmering moment. It’s a place where homes reside, but buildings don’t ever reach the clouds. It’s a place where exhaust isn’t recognizable, and nothing looks like anywhere else.

Scottoline and the band point out where every cloud looks like shapes that stir up memories, but with new details.

Projections in the sky of everything that could be, and is genuine.

Scottoline sings, “I keep letting me down / Thinking everyone is out to get me,” but based on the path Hurry has already set, and the trajectory forward from this new single, all we want is more of what Hurry does best: deliver good song after good song, forever.

(Lame-O Records)

There is constant opportunity, these days, to dial numbers into a pad, and let the codes create the aesthetic, the understanding.

Innerlove choose a much more intricate path on this new album.

Every part of each song, every strum of the heavy headed guitars sounds like SOMETHING decided.

There are no dice rolled, no off the cuff statements. There’s tending like trimming the edges of a microscopic tree.

But these songs are massive. This Long Island group of four work together like snakes digging a tunnel under everything matching and similar on the surface.

This is cutting a new shape in a store of jewels.

(Refresh Records)

The guitars walking down and farther down set a tone immediately to a place that is vacant and scanning for somewhere to hold a horizon. But there’s not line for the sun to rise above or sink below. The rows of roofs and small trees just keep stretching.

The slowness of a cat’s paw extending when a noise in the other room awakens it in a flash.

This Long Island band spreads guitar strums and splashing drums out across the yard like a paper shredder.

There pauses in the song feel like momentary endings that leave the listener wanting to hear more, just in time for this 4-piece to pick the song back up, and keep dragging it through the warm grass and afternoons that never end.

(Refresh Records)

OUR RVW: “A little winged bug lands on the surface, rippling the sun rays into tiny waves.”

Down in the cellar where the light appears in an angle.

Where the cans and glass jars sit like dusty pearls on shelves someone else built.

Guitars ring in circles, choirs of distant memory voices echo like a voicemail from someone saved on your phone who doesn’t live close by any longer.

Jeanines reemerges with “Each Day,” a new three-song EP with all the muted pastel calendar pictures of sunrises in a drawer.

It’s every neighbor on the street opening their front door to wave at the same time. A bird chirping to exclaim about the perfect temperature in the park.

On the track “Each Day,” the line “A rose is just a rose,” passes by like a tail tied to an airplane, and states the setting these songs live in. It’s a place where sounds shimmer and clang right where they are. “The same old song,” is sung as a dirge in the middle the afternoon. Jeanines have mastered the ability to collect all needed pieces for a perfectly square meal of a song, again and again, with melodies like a clean beach chair in light rain. The bass drives under the electric guitar mirroring the sung melodies. The drums bash along, the haze in the air formulates like crystals.

“What The Echoes Say,” plays as the trademark of Jeanines top of the green hill sound.

“Tilt In Your Eye,” veers away. Across a little sea, to a continent floating above the surf. Just barely up above the ground.

Jeanines, delivers yet again, with the exactness of what anyone wants to hear. It’s a string of songs to stretch over the yard on a warm evening. It’s the sound of waking up on time, and expectedly enjoying the hours that pass.

It’s a ladle in the water that stirs just enough.

(Slumberland)

OUR RVW: “A catalogue for a store you made up in your head that closed 10 years ago. But it had everything you’ve ever wanted, that has never actually been made yet.”

Listening to Juan Wauters music is to listen to something that feels actively alive and possibly changing shape or story line in the midst of the moment. The music itself carries and creates the space that sounds extra expansive, close-up, and simple. But Wauters off-the-cuff ability to whisper, chat, and say “yeah,” throughout each moment makes “Wandering Rebel,” feel like something that is happening right now.

With classical guitar patterns picked like prints on a freshly ironed shirt, the majority of the musical direction follows Wauters fingers across those strings. Added sounds, instruments, and people in the room, will enter and exit as freely as bugs flying in and out of the open door in the house.

Wauters trademarked celebratory voice peaks above the music with honest, exposed lyrics about the musings of life and the situations unfolding right in front of this organism of sound. See “Millionaire,” which directly speaks to the listener with opening line, “And you could be a millionaire and also / You could end up on the street, yeah-yeah-yeah”

From the start of the album, the conversation unfolding over bouncing patterned notes sets a loose tone that breaks into the whole of Wauters world, created with everything in the room, and in Wauters head all merging right up in the center of the music.

With lyrics on “Eloping,” like, “Your family and your friends wanna go to the wedding / We’re recording a song which will most likely be a part of an album.” Wauters masterfully draws the listener into the story, as a part of what’s about to happen, while also showcasing his ability to sing about anything happening right then and there, here and now.

From there the album sails and soars over bright breezes and melodies that stick like strands of craft paper glued to reality.

The acoustic lead line on “Milanesa al Pan,” has stuck with me since this single was released because it so simply lays out an added piece to the song that stitches the whole thing together. A towel on the floor to bridge from the rug to the carpet where water just dribbled into the shape of a cloud that looks like a treasure chest.

Wauters’s abilities in music continue to fascinate in everything working so well together, without complicating or overdoing anything ever.

“Nube Negra” and “Amor, Amor” see Wauters leaning into more casual places, sounding familiar and gentle, while never losing a smile as the drums brush and poolside cool pass by.

“Modus Operandi” which features Frankie Cosmos just might be the best Juan Wauters track yet! The setting, the guitar notes like snow flurries flying, and then Wauters voice carries in the melody of the year, while singing “some kind of Disney World.” It’s such a pure, distilled experience of all Wauters is capable of.

Other than the following track “Bolero,” which features Super Willy K, straight-talk rapping over the circus of sound blasting over the high hat ticks, and Wauters singing “forever and ever and ever and ever,” the second half of the album settles into the nest of Wauters strengths and songwriting honesty.

Title track “Wandering Rebel,” plasters Wauters whispers and thinking outloud vocals, atop piano chords and stand-up bass. It’s an ice cream sundae sculpture made of asphalt and sand.

The album lands with some dialed down acoustic moments, before closing with “En un barrio de Montevideo,” a collection of voices, and singing, and talking, like a nightclub inside of an answering machine.

Wauters can accomplish nearly anything over the span of a track list. Nothing lands specifically congruent to the song before or after, but in the moment, we’re all a part of Wauters day, week, month, year, and it seems that’s right how he wants to be heard.

This is a journey through Wauters time, eyes, brain, and the best approach is to listen and follow along closely. You never know who is going to say what, or whisper into the microphone something to make sense of the song, or life in general.

(Captured Tracks)

Juan Wauters knows exactly how to record music in a way that invites the listener to participate whether they realize it or not. It’s the extra “woo” or the tone of everyone in the studio smiling as the song plays.

The simplicity of that acoustic lead.

The fun in the willingness to make some noise and say some things that at least sound off the cuff.

Wauters creates as if, “in the moment,” as a standard, will open the song to another dimension of reality where everything for a few minutes isn’t a worry or a concern.

It’s a moment to breath all of the air in you can. Watch as mountains float across the sky, and the sun really is wearing sunglasses.

(Captured Tracks)

OUR RVW: “Decay in the walls of an old home, the front door will be next to cave in.”

Slow pace, an eye blinking after a speck of dust, something soaring through the air hits directly into a cornea. A split-second blindness, before the slow motion blinks begin to try to clear the foreign object, unseen pain.

Virginia’s Keep arrive back after last year’s full length, “Happy In Here,” with this fresh cut, “Sodawater,” that sails over a dark pit of prickly staircase guitars, and aggravated bass, churning the concrete in the basement like a soft jackhammer.

With a trajectory lyrically that tosses and turns like a sleepless night, Keep deliver melodies, seemingly more uplifting in tone, than the words that follow the trail of murky flashlight beams.

With lines like, “I’m just needing what I don’t need / That’s just the way it goes,” Keep devour the strain and stress of keeping on, while brittleness and confusion envelope like ghosts holding the objects and items you need continuously out of reach.

The height of the guitars scrambling, rise like an item on a top shelf that takes the entire vertical stretching from tip toe to fingertip to grasp. And maybe the item isn’t even what you thought it was from the angle and shadow it looked like on the ground.

This is an echo in a cave that never stops bouncing off of a surface, infinitely.

It’s a calling out for somewhere and something, and the annihilating waves of pristine musicianship enhance the desperation like a scalpel through a plastic bottle on the side of a brown riverbank.

It’s a quick track that takes the air out of lungs, a punch from a fist with a wounded knuckle bone.

Keep have an exactness, and a wide open not knowing balancing in the thin air at the peak of a mountain of desperate searching.

(Honey Suckle Sound)

Every so often, Sweden’s hidden gem, Kippo, slow drips a song or two, and when it happens the response should be to rush to it. Listen to it, and click endless repeat.

Returning TODAY(!) Kippo has dropped this 3 and a half minute slice of meringue in song form.

With vocals like a curling playground slide, and clean instruments speeding along enough to challenge a runner at pace, Kippo can’t miss.

This new one plays with an otherworldly lead over the top of tambourine and electric guitars setting across a bright sky without a cloud in the shape of anything.

The spire twisted like a conch shell on fire.

The sound from it broke like a trash truck draining into an unforeseen sinkhole.

Santa Barbara’s, Lanayah, shovels through sludge like a relentless earth mover that can’t get the ground to level. The shaking, the humming, the thrashing winds it all up like smog in a hot dish.

The temperature of the water won’t cool and can’t.

A descension down a broken escalator that continually adds stairs and won’t ever end. Falling loosely. Plummeting like a helium balloon into a field of knives standing on hilts.

A field of invisible weapons.

(Anima Recordings)

OUR RVW: “A blanket the size of a skyscraper placed in a bunch like handful of picked, dark purple raspberries unloaded into a wheelbarrow.”

A cloth drill boring into a soft tooth, cleansing the area, removing decay, hope.

Without pain.

The swirling of the threads, overlapping in excessive speed weaving throughout the rot, and rubble, relief.

Quiet calm, as the cave in the center of the clay-like bone opens wide to reveal the hollowed cleanliness of a new moment.

You can hear it in the triumph of the driving drums in “Wasted Hours,” a perfected definition of Lauds sound, in wide-open, hopeful, interlocking parts and places. McKay Glasgow and J Holt Evans, began this project as a songwriting partnership which has morphed into an entirely massive sound, incorporating musicians to help fill and create an atmosphere that settles under and through each song and sound. The congruence in the feel of this album is wholly cohesive, while each of the songs live in their own rooms and apartment numbers, nearby, same building, individual.

There’s an endlessness to the tangles of electric guitars that sweep and crest and dive and lift, and the sound, the tone feels infinite. Glasgow and Evans share majority of credit for the guitars on this album, and by the sound of it, the two have developed a language within the way the strings and chords mesh together, split apart and walk parallel paths, only to re-cross and peak like spires standing as marble columns up into the heavens, clouds coating the ornate tops, so we can only see momentary glimpses of all the sound actually represents.

Lauds works in never-ending sound, while sprinkling microscopic details along the way to keep the pace and atmospheric latitudes stretching and growing.

It’s one of those tiny capsules you place in water, and the shell dissolves to reveal a sponge that expands into a shape of a duck or a dinosaur, but this sponge continues growing until it overtakes the sink, then the room, then the floor, then the house, and out the windows, into the garden and up into the sky.

Vocally, Glasgow heads up the majority of the singing and delivery, while Evans appears on a handful of tracks, leading and directing. The two work in a catty-corner similarity, delivering their own slice from the same surprise fruit cut from the branches of a shaded tree. Glasgow gleams a little more up front, with a voice sailing over the top of the shifting ships of guitars and bass. See “Somehow,” where Glasgow calls that title out in such a way that a plane could fly through clouds, but the fluffed storm stirrers never touch the sides of the metallic needle threading through.

Evans, on tracks like “Distant Images” and “Misplace a Night,” buries the vocals a few inches under the soil, about the distance down to place vegetable seeds. The sprouts peek up quickly, but there’s a bit more between the ears and the lyrics. The guitars swirl up and above, drawing the words like a tempest capturing truths and secrets in between spinning haze.

Musically, Lauds holds to the direction started as “Parallel,” leads in, and never relents all the way through. A sound like this could become monotonous in the wrong hands and fields of vision, but not here. Each musician and piece works in extreme conditions to make sure definitions are recorded and placed in order to never lose a moment to a wash of sound.

The tiny pecking beak on the piano as an example on, “Ceedee Lamb,” which also features a Small Albums favorite Ross Page, the mastermind behind “Color Temperature.” Page accurately drives the sound of this shallow, lilac colored puddle as the piano and the guitars gently break in a breeze. There’s hints of something else to keep the sound lined like metal edging to hold the lawn together.

It feels across the entirety of the album like Glasgow and Evans, who hold the majority of instrumental credits on the album, see everything through a specific scope, and direct from that singular vantage point. Other instrumentalists are brought in to provide opportunity for different tracks, but everything is held in the hands of the soundscape sculptors and there is no room for a hint off the directive.

While the washes of sound really define the backgrounds, and the guitar work prominently leads the whole of this, the melody writing reveals such an expertise, that at times the perfection of guitars and the hooks and vocals are so interesting and well thought out that the songs can divide the brain in two places at once to keep track of everything mapping out.

Lauds as an entire entity, offers something spacious and easy to immediately get into, while moving the target gently so the focal point is hard to find, but that’s a good thing, because you need every element here to create the mass of an elemental table that Lauds is after, in developing an outer space all their own.

(Fort Lowell)

Enter the elevator with every intention of arriving tens of floors above the ground.

Rise and keep rising.

Pass the place where the loved one, or the meeting, or the plan for the day was supposed to exist. Keep ascending.

The blips and chains of melody expand in micro-textures, developing like old film in cameras that have napped in a closet no one cleans out.

Leif fills the space with elemental exhaust to clear and recover, while slicing through haze like a knife inside of a full balloon.

“Slow the car enough to roll down the window and watch the prism floating in mid-air. Grab it, study it, let it float back again.”

In the long stretches of voices harmonizing and gathering around the layered outfit of guitars with different threads and colors, it can become difficult to tell jusr where the sun inhabits.

Option 1: the sun is floating at the bottom of a crystal well, a lava sphere that cannot be soothed.

Option 2: the sky has multiple heat sources bouncing like the ball across a karaoke beach scene on an old TV in the corner of the living room you grew up in.

San Francisco’s, Leon In The Wild, projects sound like an old home video on the glimmering sign of a brand new neighborhood. With all instrumentation, recording, mixing and mastering created completely by just Leon, the music credits a specific thread unspooling from the temples of a creator that has the echoes of the choir of voices rising all around to develop something full of smiling. Direct songs in the portions of just enough to hang on the ear drums and never let go. A tray for a meal with cut out shapes so each side and main dish has a fenced arena to collect, and stand as it was intended.

On last song, “Fade,” Leon sings, “We painted a picture/ With colors we like/Hung it on a blank wall/To make it bright.” This could be a micro-manifesto as to just why and how Leon writes and creates. It’s a color by numbers sheet, but with more imagery on one paper than should be able to fit, and filled with hues and designs only Leon could display. A page no one else could manage to fill in, but rather stepo back and enjoy as these sugared sounds drive and heat like a microwave at the bottom of a late-summer pool.

Each of these six songs cuts all the bloated and over-thought out immediately, for instant, stirred-in exactness. The big moments are mountains budding from the tops of older mountains. The quiet sweeps like wind on a brush along the rivers of cold pockets in a spring-morphing-to-summer-and-back, afternoon.

The guitars continually appear in different forms. A chameleon-like adaptability to drive, sprinkle, bounce, and sway as the rest of the recipe calls for more. The strength on this EP comes from Leon’s willingness, and ability, to follow the course of where and how these songs need to land, and spread out. “Track Shoes,” which was named one of our favorite songs of 2022, sits in the midst of a portrait of other family members that all breathe the same air, and release it into different shapes of cloud in a pale sky that never becomes overcast.

Where Leon could have recreated something else going on musically, OR wrote these songs into unattainable masses, these tracks lean on just what is needed. The wisdom in Leon’s songs comes from the completion of pieces of music with just enough, without copying someone else’s work, or dribbling on far longer than necessary.

This is an EP made to be listened right through. The whole of a weekly weather forecast. It glides and bobs, rests and shoots directly up to the surface. A sprout with all the strength to become the tallest tree in the grove.

Moki Kawaguchi delivers 26 tracks that quiet the power lines, becoming a bridge for doves and climbing worms to travel across. An interstate of reimagining what grips, for a hand open to let a moth land and leave again.

(Leaving Records)

OUR RVW: “Silent cloud, silver ribbons: sky becomes a drawer full of items rounded by microscopic gusts of wind.”

Sweeping up after the party ends.

The long, dry scrapes of the broom moving and shifting over and across the stillness of the dust and floor.

Opening a window, let some fresh air brush in, pushing the dust back a little the other way.

But the chill from the forest, or the sea, or somewhere, reinvigorates the stuffy warmth of kettles and voices and lights, into a quick snap.

Low Chord merges a collection of talent and sound into a succinct recording that move like something you might hear on a distant radio across the street, mashing with the busy activity of nature, weaving itself amongst bustling shoes and conversations.

Scott Orr, a singular musical talent on the Earth, connects a multitude of sounds with the piano work of Gareth Inkster and the saxophone skill of Murray Heaton. From what I read somewhere, it seems Orr, a musical mind that pushes the normality of sound with a handling in simplicity that creates staggering depth, harbors a hard drive full of sketches, portraits and bits of paper with words written down, in the form of musical creations. Unlocking this vault, Orr fuses the quiet midnight sketchbook with the open fields of Inkster’s piano playing, and Heaton’s dazzling saxophone melodies that could border a room like 4-D wallpaper living around the tops of perfectly decorated rooms.

Nothing stays too long. You’ll gravitate to the alien formations of a beat like on “Heat Can Be Warming, or a Warning!” and as the bits of lunar keys land on top of echoing fingertips on toms, it’ll fade like the drip collected on the end of a sink faucet, falling and splaying across the porcelain, water on the pale white, evaporating before being fully seen.

The beauty in these creations, similar in tone to hold a cohesiveness of album, but foreign from each other the way big rock formations can stand alongside one another jutting up in the middle of endless Utah roadways. Arches formed, masses of rock, striped in whites and reds, oranges, and browns. Sunsets that become statues.

This album sounds like the inside of a hollow moon, where the outside stone shell disappears for a greenhouse of organisms and stalks and stems all inhabiting the rounded walls. A source of light, the core, to provide for the life needed.

“Positive, Generally,” with the clicking movement like a ghostly, toy train dancing behind the saxophone and piano ribbons sweep and swirl up and about, a dust devil in the suburbs.

Everything on this album configures like keypads at the corners of a maze, press the buttons and new doors appear and exist, and lead to more. Not in panic, not in fear, in invitation to circle around something you haven’t been given access to experience yet.

New heat and light that aren’t bloated giants that are red dwarfs. These are pin pricks in the air that shine back like warm pockets in a cold ocean. An unknown heat that brushes by, but appears with no shape or eyes.

The balance between Orr’s patterns and the analogue instrumentation lands easily, nothing gets leaned on to heavily, nothing misses when it is needed.

Moments like, “And Then It’s Over When You Least Expect It,” leave the piano and saxophone out, and Orr directs the exact experience of what it feels like to land in an airplane, but no one makes a sound. Just the midnight silence of finally reaching the ground where your house has closest proximity. The flashes in your mind of seeing your own stuff again, your dog, sleeping in your bed, the slowing of the heart, safely landed, back to what is most familiarly yours.

How these three people created something uniquely unknown in a way that feels like a place you’ve been and choose to return to, is a feat worth experiencing, leaning back in that tall airplane seat, and closing your eyes for a minute because there’s a safety in all of it.

(Other Songs)

OUR RVW: “Hold the shovel over the ground, never digging, just watching the worms and the rain drops press the soil around.”

A forest of flashlights standing up from the ground.

Creating the thickness of tree trunks out of the beams.

High up where the light bleeds into the sky, it merges like watercolors washing into other pigments, clarified.

Copenhagen’s Lowly approaches with gentle running like a car engine idling in crisp snow. There are pastures of sounds that glom like projections more than picked out pieces and parts. It runs like water overflowing in a glass. There are lawns of noise that tiny feet returning to holes in trees step across when the dew develops.

As the song moves around in pipes of sound rising and falling like TV static merging as waves, Soffie Viemose continues in singing like the narrative of air surrounding the day rather than the events of said day meaning something more. The atmosphere scales in creating and existing in terms of becoming a focus.

The garnish on a meal, revealed as the source of the flavor.

There’s something about the perimeter taking the center that lands in an angle which makes this track more than it should be.

When nothing definable no longer matters, the piling textures create a range of mountainous swelling that allows for counted numbers to lead up to something we never get to know, but works in the midst of tentacles of sound dissipating right before silence.

The continual beat drives and shapes, cutting out patterns and images like photographs when the camera moves last second and the blur makes the image something more than a picture of a nickel, a bowl, and a fence post.

Smearing reality with a thumb full of ink.

It’s the ice, dust and rock that creates the ring that grips the space around a heavy planet. Suspended and lifted.

There’s more here, it’s the painting on the cave wall, but the torch light keeps moving the other way, so no one gets to see what was left there.

(Bella Union)

The receiver hangs on the coiled line off the wall with some morse code pattern blinking in faint sound from far off.

The coast of a region where the sun shines, but never warms.

Or a riverbank that always stays warm, and the waters cannot cool.

A board game where the trail of boxes and situations curl without a direct pattern to win.

A pet on a screen you feed screen food, and it can’t come nearer.

Many bands attempt and fail at what Magazine

Beach perfects on this album, easily.

There is more in every single part on this album than most music ever accomplishes in the entirety of the track list.

The vocals weave and tangle and unravel and work together in sharp unity.

This is a snow globe being turned over to stir everything up.

This is music written like wearing layers for the weather.

It’s an album that needs repeated listens to grab up all that is provided.

Fly on a plane in the middle of a tropical night. No one else in any of the seats. Just you, in the vast, gaping metal cylinder. Pilot behind the door. All the little, oval windows open, and somehow this 747 can travel like the edge of a dagger right between trees and riverbeds. Nothing gets shifted, nothing gets jostled. Silently watch nocturnal animals and plants at a speed you don’t even realize because it doesn’t even feel like air surrounds.

(Telephone Explosion)

Gauze around an appendage.

Could be to stop up blood. Could be to wrap up tightly in hopes of loosely setting something into place. Maybe a tiny bird bone. Maybe not.

 The fracture inside circulates the pain that the gauze cannot fix.

The broken shelf of a bone splintered or split gapes under the cool yellow, or alien attempt at skin tone, the wraps of material wind and weave. 

Winnipeg’s Meadows created “Shaky,” by chance in some ways. The story as told by songwriter Isiah Schellenberg, originates as simply as a song could. A quick sketch of acoustic and vocals, recorded in an empty apartment. When listening to that husk of the song, the melody immediately makes known the down turn in feelings, in settings, in the words. “You don’t know how much you mean to me,” as broad brushed of a statement as that can be, said in passing, said when the television’s also on, said when the flights about to be missed, cuts here. Means something. And in that empty apartment, Schellenberg’s words could have coated the walls like light penciled in rain, and erased with the next coat of paint.

But Schellenberg sent the skeleton to a friend who mixes songs for Meadows.

Like a magician Lino, the friend, added the rest of the instrumentation without saying a word.

As Schellenberg describes, Lino painted the rest of this into the fruition of the song Schellenberg heard it as, but didn’t add to the simple acoustic picking, and foggy vocals, like exhaust under a cold streetlight. 

The completion of this piece as a full realized song, resonates, aches, bare hands coming in from the cold to a warm house, but having to turn the iced metal of the round door knob.

 The clenching of fists to try to get warm blood to every end of the archipelago of fingers and nails.

There’s a slow, steady pacing that altogether does not feel ‘shaky.’

Just the words inside of the long breaths of singing, describing a call, birthday cards on a wall.

There’s something here that feels like the parts of feeling words can’t fill in.

The thumping of a heart. The busyness of a brain.

The pacing of walking in a crowd and having to just walk in the crowd.

Meadows appears like a new star. Or maybe it’s been there. It’s just revolving in a way that needs to keep circling, processing, writing, and having a friend that completes the other side.

Somewhere in Seattle, these notes pouring from guitars are sticking to the walls and sides of anything. Shimmering and blinking like colors no one has ever seen. These are points of light all collected into a shape of something floating in the room next door. There’s a sturdy voice carrying a melody behind all of the bright guitars, but it’s causing more atmosphere. Everything is hand carved and careful, exact and precise. It’s the concept that water continually rushing causes a valley.

Glass stairs that lead to a place above the sky.

For 20 minutes Melanie Velarde develops a track of hushed tones and semi-patterns that lead up this staircase past clouds full of poison, and animated 2-D seashells smiling as they hold a place like stickers adhered to the space all around.

Keyboard melodies flutter around the nautical noises of synthetic ocean chimes, and deep sea pings.

It’s music for dolphins to follow after in warmer waters. The clicking of rhythm echoes like coconut shells fading into seas printed on long reams of paper.

This is music to listen to on micro-expeditions.

(Longform Editions)

Philadelphia’s Michael Cormier-O’Leary directs music like a series of short films that connect the way bird seed gathers under the feeder and sprouts a new garden when the rain falls.

Just when a verse lands in a direction, keys and vocals move just a little to the left or right so an angle through the single paned window can better be seen.

This is rich like soil. Much to listen to musically, much to understand in the words.

And our leader continues pointing things out, and singing about things beautiful and not so much.

A reality captured in honesty.

Lean forward and listen to this.

Go everywhere from letters being written between friends in audio form, to the recognition of aging and not being so sure.

(Dear Life Records)

OUR RVW: “A red thermos full of steam, but the source of heat is hard to point to. Murky, like a gutter at night.”

It’s in the final 50 seconds of “Ferrari,” when the words fade away, and the chimes start moving under the cushions on the couch.

When the ghostly voice moves over everything like floating band-aids.

Where the track starts, broken like a bone, the bent horn of a voice that’s swirling in the indifference, or gloom of autumn feeling like it’ll never end.

Crunching leaves never becoming dust.

Sun orange on the horizon or blotted out by endless foggy stew, no matter the time of day.

The decision to stop controlling, stop fearing, stop picking at the same scab.

The river water at the bottom of a glass. Who really knows what life teems on a microscopic drip, but it’s still something to quell the parch.

Atlanta’s Microwave cuts no corners, and leaves nothing out. Extends only as far as these trails need to merge with the tree line. Even if the temperature has drained the green of even pine to a pale spearmint.

It’s hard to tell if it’s early morning or late night, but “Ferrari,” hums at a pacing that feels like a glacier tipping off the side of the earth. Stretching into space, a tiny ice comet. A flat plane that never stops adding fingernail scratches to the sides.

It’s something like a fresh breath in an old shed. There’s still a window.

(Pure Noise Records)

Cut a piece of felt into the shape of a star and stick it to the wall somewhere up high like a miniature night sky.

Austin Norman sings like these are the final moments of opportunity to get everything out that needs to be said and sung and smashed against the windows where the rain won’t stop collecting.

Midcard strums into and strikes every chord and drum like they really mean this. Like something real is happening and needs to happen and it can’t wait.

From the massive growth of “Old Chair,” stretching up out of the ceiling in guitars the size of continents, to the slow build of “Car,” unfolding out into the street and down the gutter, Midcard has a purpose and plays through every song with all there is to give.

The pace is faster than humans are able to run.

To slick for claws that walk across ice.

To hot for microbes that live on the walls of volcanoes.

The drums expand and contract like a runner with no needful lungs. Just run until the shoes wear out.

With outer space and microbes becoming one region, test tubes can’t explain the patterns and developments Mogwaa is completing.

Keep running.

Imagine a carousel with chipped paint wheeling by on a stressed highway.

Imagine a macaw in flourishing colors perched on the stovetop, changing the channel on the television across the room.

Based in Nalchik, Russia, the amalgam of beats that continually shift, take a turn, and continue morphing works like a room full of old, carved clocks.

The inability to settle into anything hypnotically similar, keeps this album moving from strummed guitar or stressed strings, to the big booms of kick and crisp snare collecting at the base of a funnel full of everything.

Run an entire marathon as “Heroic” skitters and shreds. Or forage for unknown fungi as “Penne” rattles like a wine bottle on the floor of a van turning mountain corners.

There’s millions of mountain peaks to choose from here.

The spiral staircase in the center of the library leads to a telescope up in the roof that’s trained on a planet no one has named.

Look out past the stars we have stickie notes on to the place where the swirling of clouds and atmosphere become something like a fusion between land and sea. The exact moment a coastline becomes something. Until the surf moves a little farther back or forward.

Close your eyes and make your own planet. Can you see it in your brain? Or is that idea, just an idea?

OUR RVW: “Rain water pattering in the painted dish, a cooling place for the warm feet of a bird flying by.”

After some time, Jordan Lee, and Mutual Benefit, the project Lee works within, is back. And for a return that deals in a singular track that speaks on the topics, and concepts of seeds and gardening, this sleepy-eyed song, we have as a welcome back gift from the returner, sounds like the shape of a plant bearing fruit in due time, and process.

With guitar strums brushing by like a wind through a mitten, and Lee’s voice in all certainty in the uncertainty of how a landscape unfolds like a real-life map, the structures that capture the sound Mutual Benefit creates within, come back like a stamp on the back of a hand.

Magical keyboard sounds twinkle in and out of focus like looking at a star in the deep sea of night, and only sort of being able to see the glittering shape.

Long breaths in the forms of solos both on keys and guitar leave room for the days when the sprouts start looking more like stalks. Or the first morning a pea is hanging on the pale green, curling wire.

“Little Ways,” rings like a microscopic church bell in a cupboard city. There’s something so precisely minute in every moment, Lee carves and shapes with delicate tools.

The concept of the lyrics beginning with Lee’s “chance encounter with an old friend at the park,” who gifts some sort of seeds to Lee, begins a mysterious view into development and growth far beyond a surprise plant growing into some soil.

Lee takes the time, surrounded by collaborators, to sketch and draw out boundaries and areas no one else saw. The eye of a hawk watching from a high wire, recognizing the brokenness and wholeness of the people bustling around on a certain street in a neighborhood somewhere, anywhere.

Lee says, “In little ways the season changes / and I know it does the same in me.” This inward calculation feels like a direction the whole of this new album might be steering that Lee had to create to recognize the incremental movements and growth. How many legs does a centipede start with? Does the movement of a road change as the shape gets cut into a mountain? Everything growing pale and lush. Vegetation soaking up all the rain, and not rotting.

This sounds like the beginning of a tributary that will carve its way through places no one can recognize until the whole of the shape is made.

(Transgressive Records)

From the initial synthesizer melody on “Waveguide,” the growth of light painted sounds and micro structures surrounding give an exact map of what’s to unfold throughout these nearly all 5 minute tracks.

Michael Hix and the team follow a unique development of improvisation and bathing film in chemicals to outline pieces and parts into image, sound, understanding through the continual unveiling of sound and parts to layer and layer until the songs become like an upside umbrella closing around the listener in so many textures and feelings it moves past song. To memory, recognition of what’s surrounding.

Cool rivers swirling to a place beyond the seas and mountain ranges.

(Centripetal Force)

The bouncing of synthetic notes dripping like freezing rain on the surface of a hot kettle.

The breathing percussion pressing like gears and gauges building pyres of steam.

Ian Richard Devaney sings and wails like a sail sinking into iron waves, losing the gusts of air in the name of soaking down to the ocean floor where crabs and crustaceous cruelty devour and leave the skeletal structure to become the sand.

This track moves like rings of ghostly worms wriggling under the foundation and shifting and turning the walls enough to move what was flush and 90 degree angles, for something warped and worn into the shadows of what was.

(Play It Again Sam)

OUR RVW: “The orange of a tropical fish peering up through the warm waters of the pond in front of the house in the middle of every field and town in the world.”

The outline of clouds against the pale blue of sky that survives day after day like the center color of ice. There’s a gentle gust of air that relieves the stress and strain through the open window. A simple reminder in the push of invisibility redirecting the day.

Santa Rosa, California’s, Nice World, brushes by with this new EP like spray off the sea, splashing up on tide pools. A refresh in simple texture that leaves a pressing on memory and sunlit afternoons that can’t be forgotten.

The four-piece deal in glimmering guitars, unique sounds weaving like thin ribbons throughout, and concepts somewhere between the monotony of everyday situations, and the magic of something frozen melting into liquid.

The grade school wizardry of solid, liquid and gas interchangeably obvious between ice, water, and vapor, captures the airiness of certain angles to view Nice World, while other moments trickle and flood, all the way to the sharp bite of thicker moments like that driving guitar on opening track “Enjoy The Weather.” It’s what first drew us in to literally name this song the best of April. Right before the chorus floats away in a carriage of bubbles, Austin Missner and Rodrigo Alarcon introduce the racecar pacing of absolutely slaughtering the competition with that puzzling guitar lead that fits so perfectly, somehow.

Anna Rose Miller leads the band with vocals floating and staring into the reflective pond with thoughts on month changes, shaky realizations in relationship, and the vastness of space in realizing for all life is and is not.

Change between the 6 tracks here, and find something congruous and well-designed, while each member of the band works hard enough to individualize every moment so nothing feels repeated or the same as before.

The hooks are extremely well crafted, this is a collection of songs that will ALL get stuck in your head at the same time. A tapestry of guitar work and melody that work perfectly. Endlessly.

“Cold Outside,” with its calling out into evening, dials in gentle hits that accent enough to lead the song to the trough of clean ending that finishes just exact.

“Never With You,” deals with the bite of a snake hiding in the grass with the most beautiful fountain of guitars working together in a blending, like paints into a new color, never before seen.

Nice World captures a sound that fits into the day, the hour, the minute, and expands the moment into highlighting and lighting up everything worth really noticing.

Between the band name, and the title of this EP, Nice World creates exactly what they call out. Enjoyment and a nice place to land and listen.

In our ever continuing deep dive into Bandcamp to find bands and music passing us all by, while crafting the best things we hear, we recently discovered NICE WORLD!

This Santa Rose, California 4-piece brings a sharpness in the middle of a hazy Summer afternoon moment of imagination. Rodrigo Alarcon and Austin Missner slice through this great track like freshly sharpened ninja stars through a grape Jell-O mold. The descending progressions work like a staircase into the base of an empty volcano, while Anna Rose Miller sings over the top like sparkling dust caught in the sunlight through the side window. Diamonds like butterfly wings transporting the oxygen into something from a distant mythical land.

Everything bounces on strings like puppets.

Pianos relaying old stories and new information in patterns like a ball on a string tied to a paddle.

There’s a distilled hush over these songs. Giving Paschburg a modest quilt to stitch together. A certain length of material to hem up, and in each stitch a world of sound and open space in equals distances.

The piano coming around the corner again and again, leading new sounds, horns, voices, but still keeping a mysterious measure of time when no sound can be heard, in between. The spaces next to the piano keys.

(7K!)

OUR RVW: “An unraveling like a house fire reaching the yard. A weaving like a warm shirt.

A garden of sculptures works in balance. Cut marble weighs heavy, and large-scale pieces appear like major characters in space. There’s a presence to the chiseled and hammered stone that stands larger than reality, but also creates a uniqueness in form and function. Frozen moments of life with painted over eyes of smooth rock and specific direction.

In the same turn, there’s the gloss and capture of life frozen in the creation from a tool working against the block, until there’s a specificity to exactness that cannot be changed or added to. Unless of course some act of God moves the tectonic plates beneath the manicured lawn, and breaks the hours of picking and scraping into pieces.

One Step Closer grips the tools they form with, and hammer and work to formations of heaving guitar chugs, threats of attack in the distance on drums, and howls and screams ribboned in between sung melodies that hold and hook before everything topples again. Or builds to a higher pitch.

Yet, there’s something in the creation of this band’s music that works like carved marble. The heavy hammer paired with some sort of ‘soft thought,’ that allows for cool pools in the center of a flow of magma.

With lines like, “And the blue jays fly to the apple trees tonight,” there’s a hard hitting that gets stopped by stronger glass, so the window stays structured. A realism to the world around instead of scorching anything in sight to match the smashing effect of sound and settling.

Over the course of these three new tracks, One Step Closer works in balance between the driving depths that continue skyrocketing this sound and group to levels up and above anything before now, while incorporating and working to develop feelings in the middle of the ridged and overheated.

Ryan Savitski’s shredded throat cries and mourns more than demands and points with broken fingers. There’s an honesty and depth in the screams, the lyrics pairing into an emotion more than an assault. The waves of singing that collect around the sides of “Turn To Me,” trickle into the center of the focus to deliver the chorus, “Even with my shame/ I’d choose your side.” There’s something exposed in the song like bone appearing where skin should have it covered, like a cupboard shut up to keep the mess off of the kitchen counter.

The draw down, to continued “Turn to me,” choruses sung, take the fangs out of the ripping guitars, and giant drum hits, to allow for there to be more to the sound than simply rolling over everything and slamming into a wall.

Colman O’Brien and Ross Thompson create in paired guitars moving all over the stretched geography of each song, utilizing every pigment and item in the room, to drive and hit hard, while leaving room to let a breeze pass by, catching it in an open net, rather than pressing it back into the corner. There’s endlessness to the enjoyment each guitar part weaves, while the other chugs, or vice versa.

One Step Closer sounds massive, the actual audio of the hits and the, “STAY WITH ME,” screams at the end, topple and grow at the same time. A mountain rising and forming under an older mountain, rolling boulders and patches of ancient snow apart as a sharper, younger peak takes its place.

“T.T.S.P.” sets off with a few ounces of acoustic guitar picking into some mystical place on an old map, but immediately gets burned up as electric guitars curl into focus and drive and step like a parade of wolves taking over the center of the main street.

One Step Closer delivers in three songs right where they left off on 2021’s full-length, “This Place You Know,” but with an obvious expansion and growth that develops right in the center of each of these songs, without trying too hard to make sure everyone knows they’re continuing evolution of holding a place they continue forming while working to build.

And maybe forming is a better word than chiseling. One Step Closer works on these songs like moving and sculpting malleable gold. Creating crags and corners, landscapes and shrill peaks, in a glimmering, workable context.

(Run For Cover)

OUR RVW: “I saw the teeth of a jaguar, made of fire, bite through a candle, and it turned into liquid steel.”

I recently saw someone ask on Twitter, if people were cool with the songs on an album varying in styles and sounds. I, for one, am a fan of music continually keeping things varied and interesting. The one note of many bands, and their albums loses me immediately. When it’s stamped out precision, I’ll just find the best of the patch of white flowers, pick the one, put it in a glass vase, and watch it wither.

So, what if the sounds and movements vary rapidly in one single track? What if the bludgeoning of concrete with bats and bars

gives way to

unidentified moments of musical wandering,

only to chase rooted trees made of only shadows with a wildfire

which gives way to chaos like actual planets rocking off of their tilts and angles

and cutting gaps in space and time?

A baseball bat hitting the sidewalk, that ends with the structure of time dissolving off the side of the universe.

The Ongoing Concept, a name as appropriate as anything I have ever seen for the sound of a band, returns this year with a new album, and this first taste, “Prisoner Again,” switches places with itself continuously in a dizzying movement like the bullets in a machine gun, trading for paint palettes, trading for jungle cats in trees wailing in the middle of a night that never ends. Calling out as the moon also fades to black. Then the stars.

The tone of this song sounds like daytime will never return.

The sun sets, and drops into an ocean bigger than the blaring, burning sphere that heats and burns skin, and there’s no returning. It cools to a giant black lava rock. And the rest of us are left wondering why it’s noon and car light rivers are still draining down every highway. Everywhere.

The barrage of kick drum as a pathway through the chaotic shaking and caving in, carries the majority of what ends as rapidly as it begins. The song will stop and start, sing and scream, but the reliance lands on Parker Scholz to drive as quickly as possible on the blasts from a kit that can only hold this much pressure for so long.

The terror of the introductory synthesized ripping and shredding pairs with, “ohs” like a boy band is about to take the stage, but that drowns itself as quickly as Dawson Scholz begins the panicked vocals that relentlessly lead and guide through a path he sounds to be cutting in the moment. A machete of screams that make vines die before the blade can even unsheathe.

Parker Scholz picks the band up with the sprinting drums and carries the weight until everything stops in the name of a meandering guitar part that cleans everything up, almost sounding like the fingers on the frets are deciding the next note as it’s being played. There’s an unsettling scratching sound, like a cricket loading a handgun. With drum hits like a giant bouncing a house against a mountain.

The name of this band helps give context to how wide the sound keeps expanding. An equatorial line anywhere, everywhere, any time, every time. What’s the name of a sphere that widens in the middle until it becomes a 2-D circle again?

Once the layers of vocals start mounting under this rising tide, the sound heaves and crushes like a glacier being collectively lifted by the band and thrown against the Earth itself.

When Scholz screams, “Save yourself, save yourself, save yourself,” the depiction of what it would feel like to try to outrun and find shelter as a comet enters the atmosphere preparing to impact the ground forever, becomes tangible. Dust in the mouth you can’t wash out.

From there The Ongoing Concept digs a gaping endless tunnel to the magma core and everything swirls and slides down the sides until there’s an immediate break. A not returning.

The Ongoing Concept has always dealt in the unexpected, drawing lines, and then stepping right over them to keep everything and everyone guessing. This return feels right on brand with endless chaos colliding with pieces and moments no one would script.

The concept is, never give in to what would be predictable. Just keep moving, and tracing new shapes, colors, emotions, but drive it like a drill bit through an unbreakable window.

(Solid State Records)

OUR RVW: “Slow like a side ache when you have to run a mile.”

Gauze around a river that circles in a loop.

Orchid Mantis and Fog Lake unite in a wounded split second audible sinking.

The touch of autumn production that Orchid Mantis eloquently weaves with instruments beaten into the dirt, but with gleaming gems crusted on the edges.

Weary chords strummed and resting like sleepy eyed noon time naps.

Fog Lake’s Aaron Powell lends the trademark of slow blinking, murmurs through the torn screen window, sung like a funeral happening on a hill as you drive by. Not knowing anyone there, but seeing the long shadows of evening trees, and heavy eyes that have been up all night. Here and there.

“Canine Teeth,” meanders by like a canoe without a rower. Steady in the stream until the bank becomes the target.

A collaboration for the ages between two of the most consistent songwriters in music at the moment. Each with a sound of specifics that overlap perfectly. Like two wool blankets sheltered in endless rain.

A combination plate of minds combining into a landscape that has no end. The planet expanding as the land continues to shape into edgeless crust.

Warm guitar strums over the unending winter chill of layers and layers.

Texture like punctuation marks never used until this recording.

Words and ledgers left in pockets of a world just getting discovered.

For everything we don’t yet know at the bottom of the sea, the land a sky remain a mystery endlessly unfolding into somewhere we can’t stop watch untangle into place.

OZmotic & Fennesz have teamed to discover what hasn’t been mapped.

Here’s the map.

Pardoner have released two singles from their forthcoming album that both sound like exactly what you’d ant a new song you put on the stereo to sound like.

Loud and splashing, big and ready to get into.

Max Freeland sings like looking around for someone in the room, while staring straight into the eyes of everyone.

When the shift in “Are You Free Tonight?” hits, the temperature rises to the point that the speakers have nowhere to go.

“My Wagon,” shimmers like old oil drained directly into the gutter. The chemical skin of a fish staining the side of the rode like berry juice on a new shirt.

These songs rip right open, smash glass and smile through it all.

(Bar None Records)

OUR RVW: “Frozen desserts on the table in the yard, reconfiguring as the heat from both orange and red suns melts into the structure, warping like a Halloween mask on another planet’s holiday.”

What great news for all of Planet Earth that Pearl & The Oysters have returned with yet another incredible and excelling album. This duo creates the music they exactly want to, without pretension, or a desire to fill any expectation of what anyone else might want to hear.

That’s what makes these songs sound so complete and perfect.

The Los Angeles duo manipulates sound and key pieces of their songs with layers of synthesized gold and “odd” introductions to shapes from other planetary systems.

It’s the place where a Dreamsicle and a stream of neon bubbles merge outside of a traveling carnival, and they all arrived here by way of U.F.O.

From the initial textured unknown of album opener, “Intro(…on the Sea-Forest),” the landscape sets up to act out beyond simply putting instruments and song to the recording.

For every exactly executed bass line, or melody that catches like a silver hook in the mouth of a tropical fish that glows with bioluminescent brilliance, there are chimes, rattling utensils, and blips and burps from under the surface of a planet made of ice AND lava.

The strength Pearl & The Oysters approaches song crafting with lands in the region of the basics being covered in excelling sound and songwriting understanding. The sound of the songs, the parts, the melodies, the trajectory, come easy, which gives Juliette Davis and Joachim Polack incredible measures to experiment and add details in every chorus and line, buried and hiding around each corner like Easter eggs in a video game that endlessly drop through the edges like wet paint in every fluorescent shade and tone.

There’s an easy entry point to collide the breeze of the sea and sand, that capture a majority of the aesthetic and literal lyrical content, with the outer space sounds and OTHER lyrical content, in aliens spreading their towels on the beach in each song.

But, the instrumentation drives deep and direct. The beats fizz and gather. Truly, the bass work across this album is worth a listen on its own. Nothing is wasted in the lower register of every song. The bass wiggles and worms its way to the top of every song and accompanies Davis’s voice so naturally and enjoyably.

“Fireflies,” with keyboards landing on marshmallow fluff, pack around kick and snare, with walking chimes like a circus in a lagoon.

The angular, momentary insect world of “Timetron,” only a true interlude, lends a perfect bridge from “Pacific Ave,” right into secret BEST song, “Loading Screen,” without even fully being noticed. Davis’s voice delivers a commentary on our world of screens with a breeze of a slap to the face against all of our eyes continually spent on our phones, while spoonbills and dolphins sail by without us even seeing. “Losing steam, tryna say something profound/Loading screens, loading screens, are all around/All around.”

“Moon Canyon Park,” enters with harp strings fluttering like a mermaid’s cavern, before the seascape chorus and bouncing chords turn the camera to a darker place full of vents pouring heated fire from the center of the planet.

“Read The Room,” scuzzes by with electric guitar like a messy garage, and for a moment it sticks out, feels out of place, until the golden rings of the sky begin to circle. Yellowed glory, with synthesized key patterns, as the song begins to ride higher. A stallion with legs growing longer and taller, like a giant stomping over an under the sea mountain range.

Across these 13 songs, Pearl & The Oysters return, yet again, with an offering hard to beat by any standard in well-written music, that impacts by the development of EVERY second. There is more audible detail packed into EVERYTHING without ever feeling bloated or worn out.

Enter this album with high expectations. They will be met, and then sped by.

It’s Pearl & The Oysters, they’re better than everyone else.

(Stones Throw)

OUR RVW: “Neon gorillas, pasted in a palm tree, on a felt board, rolled up and sailed out of a turquoise window, into the heated wind of summer.”

There is a collection of bands and artists, we at Small Albums consider, “Small Albums” bands. A collective of creatives that connect completely with the aesthetics and sounds we enjoy most, that we have had the joy to share and hope to get more ears and attention on.

If we view this collective of artists as a “club,” Pearl & The Oysters would have to be the President. From the onset of discovering this LA duo, each new track and sound has relentlessly held our attention and been a beacon of shimmering, gleaming, music, delivered as if the sound of the movement of a planet through a telescope could be heard.

On this newest of singles, “Konami,” Joachim Polack and Juliette Davis, return to the map they’ve drawn out. A chain of islands and continents encased in glimmering, magic dust. The sound continues in the solidified sun bleached, martian beached tones and textures, as Davis’s voice sails like summer leaves/solar wind.

The bass moves around, inside and out, directing and grooving, as flourishes of flute, steady drum beat, and synthesized keyboard sounds bubble, collect, and design.

Something in the collective sound scoops together like a sandcastle with a giant amethyst buried in the center.

The interchange between verses and choruses works as if everything is cohesively the same, while subtle changes agree to texture like those lumps of paint that stand up off of a canvas, in an exhibit inside of a tent on the edge of a mysterious country.

The continual sung phrase, “weird dreams,” delivers like the literal definition of what is being heard, as the short, and simple, track wraps like a towel around a cobra with only one fang.

The flute that puffs and depletes in and out like a smokestack on the top of a candy factory aids alongside the synthesizers building on themselves. The dynamic of the high-end flutters, collect the low end like a burlap sack around collected under water gold, being stolen and shipped across the sea.

Pearl & The Oysters takes whatever seems at hand to write and direct this new track in a consistency with past tracks, while expanding the horizon. Always leaving us with hope of a new full-length. Here is to hoping 2023 ends with more of what “Konami” has presented.

(Stones Throw)

“A werewolf bite

grows into a rash

grows into a tattoo of a hammer breaking the sidewalk into pieces.”

What’s the best way to start a new month?

With one of the best bands in the world releasing a revamped song from an old album as new material for a rerecorded, new EP.

Perennial, a New England trio, that delivers every moment of every song like shooting haunted house decorations out of a shotgun, have returned, and continued the midnight hour they’ve locked us in to.

In 2017, Perennial released their first full-length which has now been picked apart, and reconstituted, to deliver 5 of those tracks as recreated life forms, hacked into pieces, and sewed back together, with more frantic clarity and sharper, sharper fangs.

“Dissolver,” the first single from this forthcoming reentry, rises as a Frankenstein’s monster of old ideas stomping back into the center of the focus, with new life and fresh vitality. Perennial clings to the ability to turn volume and intensity to maximum registries in the name of slamming through the low-lying brick walls of current modes and manners of musical delivery. While everything else seems to be pointing that way, Perennial is continually going THIS way, and we are following.

With only three members, Perennial captures a mountain peak of intensity, with the ghosts of lost climbers floating around the icy caps with red eyes, and throats like a pack of coyotes feasting in the middle of the night.

“Dissolver,” leads in with a scourge of feedback and wide-eyed drums, running from claws in the dark. Chad Jewett’s trademarked electric guitar slashes, and Perennial is back to high speed power punching, as mythical creatures and lurking monsters in the lagoon, rise to surround the sound Perennial continues to solidify.

Jewett and Chelsey Hahn, kick back and forth vocally, shouting and wailing, before Hahn directly screams into the end of the track, followed by a repeated sample, “Do you want to resonate? Do you want to reverberate?”

Perennial is asking the questions they already said “yes” to. This song resonates with the sheer force they put in to every portion and piece, so even after the 2 minute onslaught ends, those raging voices, and Wil Mulhern drumming in an attempt to knock down a building, continue bouncing off the walls, now shaken from the fasteners and foundation.

But, Perennial as a concept, as a sound, as a band, reverberates, and this new track only adds to this feeling. Nothing else going on is working like this band. Perennial is doing something uniquely formed that keeps growing. A noxious cloud of the best sound and feel, that expands and expands. Our hope is, everyone gets drawn into the crushing fog.

OUR RVW: “Webs wrapping on the eaves, rainwater collecting like eyes watching from the corners.”

This is a song for when the evening cuts over to actual night time.

It gets dark, but the clouds full of snow, light it up like an orange atlas.

When the temperature drops halfway through the day.

Frost swirls, but nothing freezes.

Arthur Alligood the brain and composer behind phoneswithchords arrives on this new single with exact measures, drum machine sounds and an acoustic scramble like river ways all connecting together in the center of a town with no skyscrapers and barely any buildings or trash or bad weather.

Except for, this low lying cloud that won’t seem to disperse.

There’s a hollow sorrow in the wounded wing of Alligood’s voice softly committing to the requests to get “somebody” to give him a chance.

The track never meanders but feels exact like a purpose that has been set to survive no matter what.

The tangle of picked notes and choir of voices in the chorus continue on a loop, but it feels like the continuation is filled with additional pieces that might be in a memory, or maybe buried in the sounds.

Alligood’s precision in layers of sound burrow in to the sound of the guitars all working together and the song relentlessly swirls to a low-grade fever. The warmth of the room swells, it presses on.

(Totally Real / ZTapes)

Terry Price understands the depths of writing a single song.

Every song on this album sits like a feast on a long table.

Listen to this 10 song album, but leave it feeling like you’ve read an almanac.

It’s extremely wide in the production, while the piano and guitar details are microscopic.

Price’s voice, like a familiar memory of weather in a new town, tells stories, overthinks, remembers, and brings the listener along in a way that keeps thread throughout the patterns.

This album works like a ghost in the backroom organizing family photos.

It’s like a chair that’s been on the same porch, for every year since it was built, and holds the scratches and lines from every day of rainstorms, and items being carried back and forth past it.

OUR RVW: “Ink spilled on the inside of a glove in the shape of a word no one has ever said before.”

Pile writes for the corners of low-lit rooms where the heat all pushes. Leaving a chill through the middle where the chairs and ground cover rest. When the vents blare on frigid nights, and the scoops of warm air all travel to the pale browns of the edges. It’s the sea sickness in trying to row out to see a sunset, but the shifting, uncontrollable motion underneath can’t be stopped or slowed. Stomach churning, the painted skies get lost in the reflections on the water. Down and blended into the chalky grays of not night, not day: paralyzed evening.

There’s something direct about the sludge of heavy night colliding with Rick Maguire’s damaging vocals cutting in and out of the caustic fumes of city centers and poison berry plants releasing pollen. Seeds sailing out into thin streams to eventually choke out the rest of the vegetation with vines and tendrils observing more than developing.

On “All Fiction,” Pile lands somewhere that familiarity gets a silver medal in the name of textured pattern and sound heating to a hypnotized boil. “Gardening Hours,” hits with overheated guitars so scarred the sound feels like molten hands reaching to get through a pair of headphones.

Pile works in dynamic bigger and smaller, louder and softer, straight forward and jarringly uncomfortable, like hands switching the card without anyone noticing. Was it really magic this time?

Maguire sings with the teeth and tongue of a desert where scorpions collect at the edge of an oasis just long enough to realize the lapping up of relief is a mirage, and the sand stretches like arms that won’t ever reach to wherever the cup in the cupboard is supposed to be. The tone of a voice stating something important, as the rising guitars and drums circle and cave in, looking for anything to lock on to and devour.

Pile works as a band ready to challenge and be challenged. On this new album, the places where a specific part or melody could create something lasting, stamped into place, gets thrown and scattered as quickly as it comes into focus. These songs feel like the entire process of painting something worth putting behind glass. The base layers scrawled and scratched, the formation of shape and vision brought into focus, a palette knife cutting out where it can and will, enough to not leave anything seem too perfected. (It’s all exact, it just looks like someone unintentionally mixed it all up.) They know exactly what they’re doing.

The guitar skittering across “Blood,” like a single engine plane realizing issues while suspended amongst clouds that cannot see, cannot reach out to help. The loud/soft of the guitar simmering into the gentle middle of the song, only to pick back up as Maguire realizes there’s more to say. It’s water boiled for tea, poured into a tiny cup to steep, only to boil again in the fractured pour. Strings peaking up and around, drowning even the thin razor ribbons of the guitar, busily pursuing the vocals like hornets after honey on a trash can.

Every song works like a collage of pieces collected after a storm. Branches and cups of chemical colors, bits of dust stuck to a Styrofoam cup thrown from a car window.

It works like a ferris wheel that unfolds into a pathway rather than a circular returning to anything. The starting place will never get back to the beginning. There’s too much to find up ahead.

Pile defines a sound elongated in statures, with micro moments and sounds along the way. The stretches of sound that become the basement for Chappy Hull, Alex Molini, and Kris Kuss to follow Maguire into the dark, knowing this ends up somewhere worth plodding to.

The tiny bits of keyboard chords on “Forgetting,” depict an attention to detail this band places in every second of their sound. The growing drums that follow up as Kriss Kuss leads the band to an open cavern of snare rolls and synthetic insects as Maguire calls about an “invisible thread.”

Nothing ever lands comfortably here. But passing through the entry gates of “It Comes Closer,” introduces the listener immediately to a purpose in spending time here that has nothing to do with finding a place to sit, and completely a journey through places without definition exactly.

It’s a haunted house in the middle of the day.

The sheets are pulled back, the masks are hung up, the sound effects aren’t playing, the floor still creaks.

Pile made an album to create something. Pile made this album to develop. Pile made this to punch through the calmness of glass you walk by every single day.

And maybe the paranoid frenzy of sounds that never speed by, but drive deeper like long nails through brick, structure and build to complete something that never gets the chance to step back and fully understand. Understanding isn’t the point, the close ups on moments and measures continue like slides on a microscope carousel to give hints, but never spell it.

(Exploding In Sound Records)

Throughout each year, we land on a handful of albums we have no prior knowledge to, or expectation of what we’ll hear, but just a genuine pressing play to see exactly what’s here. In these rare moments, an album unfolds more incredible and perfect than we could hope for.

Plain Speak, this Norman, Oklahoma duo, have created something extremely special here. Resting somewhere between sounds and echoes recognizable without taking a second look, while layering vocals and instrumentals, unexpected, yet better than they even have to be, “Calamity,” continues song after song in just EXACTLY what needs to happen next in every second.

It’s the reflection in the surface tension of the water in a cold well.

It’s the bend in a creek where a house no one knew about is resting just behind taller grasses. It’s an album that will pass by in perfect song after perfect song, until the album ends and it’s almost unbelievable this album isn’t being talked about by everyone, everywhere.

(Clerestory AV)

OUR RVW: “Key shapes cut into the buttons on keypads places along a bridge with a roof and a glass floor.”

Floating like cloth pulled up from the ground and swirled in air by hands and arms no one can see. Identifying the source of where the wind moves from. Caves in the sky generating the giant swells and pushes of air, speeding through, and in-between everything and everyone. The starting place of something that feels like there isn’t a “go” or a “stop.”

It's the concept of traffic. Who is the first car that started this slow line? Where does it end? Who is the first person not to ever see the road at a slug creeping pace?

Philadelphia’s, Pine Barons, have cut a succinct platform to build this new single on with directness and brushing past moments. It’s a place that makes sense immediately, sounds like something worth following up and down the heavenly tinged arpeggiation. Stairs created from the thinness of color and pigment more than structure. Wings over water.

The bass deep and driving, lights in a tunnel flashing by car windows in the middle of the night.

Everything in between, guitars, drums, moving sounds rearranging a room that just got arranged, all colliding to the peak build at the end, where the steady hand of the blinking, prancing arpeggiated notes bounce above it all for a last few moments.

Pine Barons return with a track so well executed, there really is not a moment in the motion that sticks out, it just all delivers as a horizontal line, like cutting a cake knife right through the center of a month.

As the song rises, a wave of foreign, sweet cacophony like an ocean made of glass candy, Keith Abrams cries out, “Wake me up Mommy/I want to drink some tea//Don’t worry honey/this is all a dream.” A TV series ending stuffed with something realistic in the way Pine Barons folds the music and scape of noise so equally and exactly together. A dream where the movement in the room is everything from atoms to couches floating and waving like flowers on a vine. Like one of those amusement park rides with the mechanical octopus arms lifting and dropping the passengers up and down until the slow breath of stillness becomes a pause, and just the blinking bulbs along the ridge continue moving with gentle popping, glass sounds.

Pine Barons creates an open space, and a tunnel to walk through, in the same place. A direct pointed finger and a hand turned over like, “What’s going on here?”

A discovery in sound for the band, and every listener, to directly make a journey into, and through, and across, and back again.

(Grind Select)

Oakland, California’s Poppy Patica, will challenge your ability to settle in to the tub of sound this album delivers, in micro-details.

It’s seemingly a straight forward guitar strumming, net full of catchy tracks lined up like bowling pins in a candy factory.

But tiny blips and glimmers will entangle the tracks in unexpected delights. A synth line here, a tone or pause that will land correctly, just a little surprising!

The way the melody on “Handprint,” presses out past where it HAD TO go on the verses, lands just a little off center, and it needs to be exactly that.

This is a familiar place, with brand new colors marking the walls and doors and chairs and windows.

It’s light like a smile being directly highlighted by a flashlight when the sun is supposed to be setting, but the day feels endless.

(House Of Joy)

OUR RVW: “If an owl with neon wings waits in the middle of the night for the sun to explode, the day will arrive like never before, and never stop.”

Everything shifting around like umbrellas in the sand with two legs walking and stopping and starting when the surf rushed up.

Hot sand curling up into a spire and biting the edges of the crust of the earth.

A time lapse of rust on a metallic wall in reverse to when there wasn’t any red/brown mangled toothy grin growing like a stain, a rash.

Moving quickly, crabs running from one hole in the ground to a cave full of chemical dust and water glowing from the run-off up above.

Peter Hartmann strums and sings like curtains brushing around the edges of an open door. Sea breeze overloading the porch with heavy gusts and seconds.

Nikhil Rao directing the traffic of all of these cars driven by mice and insects, while also screeching synthesizers like stars that didn’t wear a seatbelt at a sudden concrete wall in the middle of the highway.

This Oakland four-piece appear like fireworks all pointed into the center of a circle. Ready to combine into a mash of flame and color that fizzes like soft candy with a little vinegar and baking soda waiting in the wing.

It’s a curt cutting of a shape in cloth we’ve never seen, exactly. The fabric, the shape, the lighting, the temperature of the room, the room in the house, the house on the street, the street in the city, the city in the middle of the land, the land on the planet, the planet: a wavy hologram in the palm of a rainforest creature yet to be discovered, on the screen of technology in the hand of a mythical creature watching with multiple eyes in the middle of a flat plane floating through a pink and blue bubbles.

Watch and move. Bounce and stand still.

(House of Joy)

The grid, the fence, the wall, the squares: the art that accompanies this quick flash of an album outlines exactly what occurs in Evan Bernard’s music.

It’s clean cuts and structure like a weekly pill organizer. Everything is divided up to parts and pieces that make for songs that eat up any other sounds in the room, but fly by and end before anything can get too comfortable.

Listening to “For Me,” speeds by like watching a comet that was supposed to sail around the moon, but misses the trajectory and lands on the surface of the dusty ground.

It’s an endlessly looping infinity pool of hooks and some of the catchiest melodies a team of scientists couldn’t even figure out.

(Lame-O Records)

Straight from London, Pynch arrives with a particular plan and sound, and nothing holds it back, nothing could stop it.

Spencer Enoch sings on the front of every track like a fireplace in place of teeth and a tongue.

Pynch remembers places you’ve been before, and then turns the volume and the temperature up enough to burn it all up, and reunite with something brand new.

Every single track is a hit. It’s one of those albums that you listen all the way through, and continue nodding along to, making faces you don’t even realize you’re making, turn the volume up, until the numbers stopping rising and you’ve hit the peak.

It’s the cool under a bridge, and the explosion of every firework in the city at the same time.

(Chillburn Recordings)

As I tweeted, “The (rat) boys are back in town!

As has been already reported, this is Batboys first venture into a full band collaboration on their upcoming album, “The Window.”

On “It’s Alive!” Ratboys continue their heated up, quiet fire of a sound, with rain drops on a spider web guitar leads, and Julia Steiner’s trademarked voice like a cattail growing out of a city river.

This new track continues the corner of Ratboys endless excellence with yet another completely accessible track, that continues unfolding like a blanket with a painting of a pasture painted on the inside.

(Topshelf Records)

OUR RVW: “Flatten out the globe, now put it back into a sphere, but with creases, and unchangeable lines, this time.”

Peeling vegetables into a running sink.

The water, cold and crisp, capturing the long slides of root skin, imperfections, divets.

The groupings of possibilities, collect together, in bits of skin and organic, unneeded material.

It feels wasteful, maybe.

It feels messy, certainly.

It become necessary, to gain nutrients from the whole.

Writing from Austin, Texas, Raul Gonzalez Jr., creates new music on a consistent basis. Releasing EPS and albums, steadily, in a uniform mode, that lands somewhere between the breaking of midnight silence with a guitar, and simple breath on a cold window; all the way to moments that roll up like a cloud pouring over the peak of a purple mountain where the sun can reflect itself easily.

There’s something continual in Gonzalez Jr.’s sound that adjusts into every new musical endeavor in pairing down and focusing,

pairing down and focusing.

A knife with an eye to see the straight lines.

There’s a reality of looking into the mirror to catch the same stare that’s being given, all the way to ACTUALLY wondering, ‘where is any of this going?’ (This being life as a continual wholeness or lack thereof.) But Gonzalez Jr. grabs ahold of this realness of living in a way that sounds reassuring even as everything seems shivering and uncertain, and growing in unsteady footing.

On the track, “Dungeon Master of Puppets,” (incredible title), Gonzalez Jr. puffs like a piece of sky moving in high winds, “I am not the greatest/ But I am doing my best.”

It’s not false humility, it’s not an insult to himself, it’s his honest assessment. Yet, from the time we crossed into Raul Gonzalez Jr.’s music, there’s been a special place we have placed every song. A shelf specifically for just this pattern and mode of musical release. A trophy case for someone that leads their own music with a true sense of humility, trying, wanting, but maybe not believing fully in himself. It’s a willingness to keep trying. To keep strumming, and saying real things in melodies that consistently sound LIKE SOMETHING. Something great, something everyone should hear. These songs could be played on the most micro of headphones in the ears of someone that curates their own daily playlist to frost and landscape over the real world, real realities, real moments, real tasks and errands. Just a few people know about it. But Gonazalez Jr. has the self-awareness, and songwriting skill to turn these songs on, on a speaker for the whole entire world to hear, and it would be a string threading through EVERY life, every path and journey, and every person would relate while also easily connecting to these tracks.

As the musical career of Gonzalez Jr. goes, the focus in the music continues to direct. From the start of “Wanderer,” opening track, “Meek,” lands directly on a chorus that bunches like three balloons tied to a chair for someone to celebrate. It’s there, and it’s good it’s there. Pointing something out.

The set up for this album arrives in simplicity. There isn’t anything to untangle, nothing to have to hack away at, to get to the golden center. It’s all right here for us. There are celebrations of the guitar solo, (see, “Seasons.”) The acoustic guitar breathes like a candle consuming the oxygen to keep the steadiness of light flowing out. Gritty electric guitars are revealed in digestable pieces, not too overheated, but ready to give some minor fangs to the sounds. Other than drums, provided by Saul Hernandez and Jerry Ramirez, Gonzalez Jr. provides all of the instrumentation, and everything collides in tasteful representation of what Gonzalez Jr. maps in his brain, that sounds better than it even appears on paper.

On, “Only Child,” the words, “I am not the same old me,” ache from the slipped discs that comes later on the album. The reality of how bones can hurt, age keeps coming, and isolation always holds an inviting hand out. Gonzalez Jr. grapples with the perspective of singing about what unfolds without our trying, and how we navigate dealing through. Much of life happens and we are somehow spectators as we live in the midst of occurrences, Gonzalez Jr. paints a loud, green circle around this reality.

Continually on this album, as the short masterpiece pencil sketches pass by with fluttering torn edges, the middle holds codes in easily breakable equations.

Gonzalez Jr. isn’t here to challenge the listener in broad strokes of heavy movement, and wild releases, like a dog ripping out of its collar. Everything is in the steady stare of a person realizing “gloom and doom right here in my room.”

For all the uncertainty and focusing on what becomes more difficult to change about life as age solidifies walking paths, and neural paths, Gonzalez Jr. holds a steady grasp on at least attempting to lasso the challenges we ALL have to face.

Maybe, that right there, is the deepest value of how Raul Gonzalez Jr. creates in such an easy and genuine way that always appears as something direct enough to relate to, while sounding like something worth hearing. It isn’t in the specifics, it’s in the general, it’s in the reality we all have to recognize, Gonzalez Jr. just knows how to say it for all of us.

(How has no label signed Raul Gonzalez Jr.???)

OUR RVW: “The space in a flame where the blue portion heats to the oranges and yellows on the edges.

There’s a desert made of grid systems. Squares and lines, boxes and cross hatches developing like endlessly unfolding film from a canister with no lid. An unraveling like threads splitting apart from the seam into a banner, or a collection of strings with one shining side, one matte.

Ryan Weber, not only develops these miniature tracks, compiled into the pyramid of all that “Nyasa et Lilian” becomes, but the instruments within the songs are all creations Weber works to design as well.

It’s a computerized creating. A hand-crafted world of intangibles. We’ll never scoop these sounds out of a bin or bucket, but the fleeting sounds of the pianos scribbling by on “Madagasikara,” or the speeding orbs of synthesized bubbling on “Swindern’s” create textures nearly possible. Something almost to hook on to and float up, and away in the midst of this soundscape planet.

Weber’s ability to utilize less than three minutes a song, while creating something lasting, affecting, is rare. In a world of instrumental tracks that can stretch out past listenable range, to the repetitive minute jamming experience of looping for the sake of time passing, Weber leans the opposite way.

Create square meals of songs, with all of the sounds and spices needed to mean something. Melody repeatable without a single word sung.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time celebrating “Grey Head,” already, but the piano march, the blips and clicks, the swelling curtains behind the sound, all unite in a track that would be enjoyable if it WERE twice, three times, as long.

There’s something to Weber’s creations that feel immediately engaging and recognizable, while leaving the few moments of each song with so many microscopic details and additives, that repeated listens become a necessity.

The pavilion of winged creatures on “Roseicollis,” babbles and flutters into something like a silent room of moving stuffed animals. Robotic pillows with arms and eyes gently becoming.

There’s a hushed assuredness in these songs that make for an existence and a journey all within the sounds.

The most difficult part is how quickly each song closes out, ready for another, but echoing back to EVERYTHING already displayed.

A hall of mirrors where everything in the reflections looks brighter, more realistic, maybe only possible on the inside of that shimmering glass.

Growing, plant and stem. Leaf becoming leaf bug.

(Katuktu Collective)

Ryan Weber captures the way something feels in a memory that can’t come back entirely clear.

Was I worried?

Was it stress?

Was it all peaceful?

The wings of dragonflies trimming the sides of a razored leaf. The slight of a wind chime reaching another for a single “ping” in the middle of a night.

A computer being connected to what a human hand can feel that it never will.

In 2 short minutes, Weber discovers more than most tracks can if they stretched on for hours.

Everything is right here.

(Katuktu Collective)

Collage college.

A course study on collisions and separations. Cutting and snipping to create new shapes, new colors, new planets.

Lucien Fraipoint and team trace and sketch only to paint and tack together without seams without lines.

Easy breathing while everything around is swelling and swelling on latitudes so close together the grid becomes its own.

Everything connects and conducts. Electricity powering no matter the hour.

Keep digging, keep floating, keep looking around.

Mississippi’s Reed Smith picks the shadowed angle of an evening backyard on the strings of an acoustic guitar, with a hollow eyed bird’s call to match it.

The lonely state in the wavering of the vocals won’t relent.

The layers under the singing and guitar driving, slather like a generous helping on an under toasted slice of bread. It’s just soft enough to sink front teeth into without crumbs trailing the counter and onto the floor.

It’s a place to dissolve into, the moon dipping behind a hill like tea leaves stepping into the daytime.

(Impatien Tapes)

OUR RVW: “When the flashlight explodes in the middle of the seaweed forest, shapes and shadows move around like keys on a keyboard that’s shuffling around like trash in the wind.”

In collaboration, possibilities expand beyond bounds set by individual opportunities. If a bee and an ant collaborated the amount they could design and move and build and structure would grow and develop beyond a hive, or a large piece of grass being moved from here to there.

If a hippo and a rhino collaborated from their arenas at the zoo, they could break the walls apart and rule the entire piece of the city.

Jameszoo and Niels Broos arrive on “MUSIC” as combined forces under the moniker ROLROLROL, and these two musical overthinkers collide in a galaxy far from sand and surf. A place where carbonated air, and food made from the shapes of brightly painted, wooden blocks exist.

Tracks like “BIG GUTS,” lead in posturing like the approach will be congruent and lead from point A to point B, but then the broken wing of a butterfly floats through over a hand drawn trumpet. Suddenly the sore throat of a candy volcano is crying out from beneath the sewer lid, and we are somewhere that’s never been before.

Slinging together numerous textures and synthetic flourishes, landscapes, and scopes, this duo approach like a teal sun nearing the atmosphere and changing the lighting around the world.

There’s a minimalism and space within these songs that are packed to shimmering gills. Somehow with all of the skipping and bouncing of synthesizers, Jameszoo and Broos leave a height within the sounds, so the chaotic tones don’t envelope like waves, but rather feels like standing at the bottom of a very tall stairwell full of flying insects, floating daggers, and haunted windows.

The beats scuttle from machines with arms and artificial strengths that lend base categories for the melodies and synthesizer pieces to tiptoe across. It’s a thin wire high above a circus full of gelatinous creatures and hand painted backdrops.

The sounds of what could be seen if the ocean had windows.

“WHEELER DEALER” clicks and counts like a calculator walking down a city street in the middle of a New Moon night.

Or a telescope trained on an entire ocean planet, where the creatures in bright pastels leap and jump above the frothing surface of waves that have nothing to stop them, or to crash into.

This album bubbles and bleeps like the inside of clarified soda. It jumps and bounces like moon shoes on a bubblegum island in the midst of a low-grade earthquake.

“SHARK WEEK,” breaks apart, a transmission from far enough away that only every third word cuts through. A walkie talkie with a knife in the speaker.

I have this thought sometimes that maybe all of reality is being programmed on a computer in real time, and all the scenery and distance I can see is just as far as the programmers have to make in order to keep me focused on everything being real.

This music is the soundtrack to what life would be like if that really was how this all was working. A giant black and green grid with a sky and ground and houses and people coded in as needed to keep it all moving in a “real” world.

(Ilian Tape)

Safari Room, or Alec Koukol as the mind inside of the project, continually balances an approach of sound that divides the softness of a piano note traveling through a window, with the heating up of spring melting under summer trees.

This new single drives and wails in the places where the train tracks feel like they could turn any direction at any moment, but the chorus dies out and billows at the same moment. A hot air balloon fully lifting into cold morning crisp.

Koukol continues to develop a sound that lands in between familiarity in the space where Safari Room really has its own space, its own room.

Koukol sings and bends notes in a way that brands this sound exactly as Safari Room lands. Another success for a musical project that deserves FAR MORE attention that it gets.

OUR RVW: “A calculation on a screen develops a point in space and time where a tree can grow without soil, without water.”

The suspicious nature of seeing something around a corner for just a moment, and then it’s gone. A sleeve, a corner of a face. The pupil of an eye zooming in, then washed away into the cool morning light.

The mysterious chasing after, looking around the entire corner, and it’s another corner, another corner, another corner.

Nothing, and no one there.

The speeding up of the heartbeat, in a state of momentary panic, grouping up into a grounding of the situation which leads corridors into walking outside, “WHO IS THERE?” Was there?

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s Alex Luquet unfolds sounds under the moniker Sailcloth. The stretches and patterns of allowing sound to fill space like cool water in a glass the exact same temperature, leaves traces of movement lost in shadow, lost in time. The ripples on a lake, near the feathers of a duck floating, and disintegrate into the breathing object, then gone.

Sailcloth defines horizon lines over, and over again, across “Resting Fields.” An EP of sounds developed to soundtrack a short film described as leaving in “painfully slow moments on screen.” But the emotion, the ache in the sounds without the context of visual, leave marks like the low afternoon sun of a brittle winter, through aging trees that have stood many winters before this one.

The patterned, whine of bass, gently mutating under the bending strings on first track, “Resting Fields,” move like water in the moments before it fully freezes into ice. Slowing movement, slowing time, slowing travel for bits of lichen and cold temperature organisms. Threads woven and never completed, hanging out of the basket under the chair.

Between iced sculptures of real places, and the chugging depths of low strings devouring tracks in the snow on moments like the continual pressing at the beginning of, “Strong Hours Work Their Wills,” Luquet allows a scope of highs and lows that relentlessly paint and brush out the exactness of season and landscape, but the ability to frame atmosphere more than tangible objects takes a steady handedness that never relents.

This is not a practice in open ended sounds for the sake of making stretches of audible excursion. There are clearly defined limits and trails to follow within the context of where Luquet needs to frame and color in space. The opening tensions of “Civil Twilight” balance between piano notes dropping through a cave in the ground, until swarms of unknown killing bees fly directly at you, and then pause, directly at you, and then pause.

Luquet makes known maps and points on said maps to travel directly to. Led by balances of analog and electric motions. Swells and sweeps. Rushes and rinses.

“Silver Star,” literally points into the ink of night, and invites a moment to not stand on ground, not hear sound, not feel temperature. It’s the space inside of space.

Everything collides, or maybe combines into a natural world where every snowflake is shaped the same, but morphs when slightly warmer breezes brush by.

This is a soundtrack to witness a patch of life through one window, or to play on repeat across a never-ending bridge. The water underneath will stay consistent, but lines and moments will continue changing, shaping, dividing, growing.

The blooming of a flower through the side of a wall. A brick wall someone painted the same color as the sky, that exact day.

It isn’t the bridge over the creek. It’s either side where the sand and gravel make dirt.

Burton’s added notes on the acoustic turns that hammer-on and off create a corner to turn down.

A voice sailing like a single seagull over the crest of a wave that’ll wash right up to where people are standing to not feel the surf, just see it.

But the strings and the swell of this track will capture the entire beach. The setting unable to escape the genuine grip this song holds from start to finish.

(Partisan Records)

Caves inside of caves. The humidity of space and time lathering condensation on the jeweled dirt along the walls.

The carved hallways from this room to that.

The long walls of blanket and stitch waving a bit, but there’s no wind. What is moving this?

Triumph in standing at the top of a plateau.

The skittering of a water strider with infinite legs stepping in living bubbles.

The warmth of a midnight when the moon shines like the sun.

(Ruination Record Co.)

OUR RVW: “A meteor flies like a spy plane, observing cloud patterns and grain fields. Never crashing, just passing by.”

Quiet as warm water turning to mid-temperature.

Not lukewarm. Not bath degree.

It’s a steeping warmth still.

Soft chords and strummed notes before the beat falls down past the windows on the 82nd floor. And the fuzz behind it like a curtain sizzling in the afternoon storm pressure.

Vocals calling less like a ghost, more like a memory that won’t fully form again.

Here we find Melbourne/Naarm’s IKSRE aka Phoebe Dubar creating this thickening gelatin landscape with Seattle’s Shelf Nunny aka Christian Gunning.

Somewhere in the center of the Pacific, the middle distance between the two, there’s a single crestfallen wave that can never make the shore. It rises and dips and spreads back out like an aquatic blanket, only to rise back toward sun and sky, and then flat again.

The gentle edges of “Falling,” work in this way. Creating peaks and points not tall enough to be seen over shrubbery, but moving in the background, seen between the spaces in the branches.

It’s a collaboration that expands in latitude rather than longitude. A place to rest and look around at the same time. Look around to see an orange balloon that slipped out of the grip of a hand and sails to the highest place it can. Then it falls like a dried flower through the altitude until it finds a place to land on a crag or a board or a mountain. And it becomes a rubber roof for a group of insects. The kind with jeweled backs and six legs.

This is a place where the in-between silences and textures scrape like a spoon along the side of a teacup.

(Hush Hush Records)

Cincinnati’s Sign Language balances the thick gauze of blistered guitars strumming through the surface of the sun, with moments that slice clean like a thin kitchen knife through the outer wrapping of groceries.

The trio of vocals that circle the songs between Sarah Tolley, Nick Ruholt and Ryne Pacheco allow for the busyness of the music to be underscored by layers and layers of thought out levels in the screams and howls, and sung melodies like a bird in a burning tree.

This album hits hard and relentlessly, but Sign Language finds a way to keep everything within the bounds of an ecosystem that keeps the trees producing all the needed atmosphere to survive the comets smashing into the ground all around.

(Sunday Drive Records)

Silver Car Crash rolls and bashes, runaway pachyderms smashing through the entirety of a city block of red brick structures.

From the initial strum scratches and guitars heating up on opener “Interference,” this Pittsburgh quartet are singeing everything in sight in the name of tearing it all up while catching the listener in a continuum of melodies and words spit like seeds from the flesh of a fruit with a kick back from the overheated scowl of the day.

Angles get turned, hairpin kicking paths, factory doors left open so the caustic fumes guitar lines off “Crime,” or the warm howl of “Tee Vee” doesn’t fill the void too heavy and there’s no air to grasp.

It’s a fast paced endlessness like running as your shoes fall to pieces and the asphalt’s summer temperature doesn’t forgive.

(Crafted Sounds)

OUR RVW: “Standing on a hill above a statue, watching the way the sun cuts through a patch of cloud, like cloth, and makes the statue shine for a minute or two.”

Having just come out of the warm lights of homes glowing in the crisp of Christmas winter nights, there’s a parallel between those tiny Christmas villages that blink and rest in frosted cotton on the ends of tables, and the actual neighborhoods we drive through that mimic as real-life decoration we interact and create memory inside of. Like a nesting doll of patches of land: tiny, sculpted neighborhoods inside of actual neighborhoods, inside of the ghostly fog of winter clouds and cold.

A place where everything feels microscopic and peaceful; placed together with tweezers and gentle nudges, movements to get everything just right.

Jacob Lawter, songwriter and creator with tiny tools, presents a song as, ‘Slow and Steady’ that shakes any holiday sounds off, yet enters this new year with a different tiny world, pieced together with instruments: musical, elements: gentle.

In, “Come On In,” there is a grove where miniature trees rise from the centers and outer rings of lily pads that levitate right above the strict structure of field dirt and icy pond water. Micro homes of straw and bits of low-lying cloud patch little roofs on the tops of houses built along the dividing lines of these water plant neighborhoods.

It’s a constellation of vegetation, and a hidden world of small pieces creating a habitation you have to look for to recognize.

With fingers moving in a syrup pacing on the strings of an acoustic guitar, Lawter sings with the focus of walking across a bridge that’s missing a few stones. Doing best not to get a shoe, or ankle, submerged in the foot-and-a-half of meandering water, while recounting a story to a friend, squinting a little to share all the details while watching the instability of the short cut.

This snapshot of a memory, a story, being recounted in Lawter’s gentle singing, maps the minimal. The significance in a moment, in a day that could float past and never form solid enough to be recounted, but Lawter holds on to something here that feels trivial and profound all at the same time.

A challenge from a mother to act in safety, riding a motorcycle “on both wheels.”

A challenge from a father to try something not so safe, “kickin’ that motorcycle up on one wheel.”

The parallel of this motorcycle, and a handful of cookies, leaves the listener with a view into a window in the house where these memories flood in from, but the context, hazy, leaves a recognition that there’s more here than Lawter’s saying. And it’s alright not to be fully in grasp of the rest of the story.

Clay White’s waves of brass, weaving over the steady acoustic, creates atmosphere that in the same way as the tiny tweezer town familiarity, makes the song grow from a road to a room. A place decorated with enough to feel like sitting down and resting as the projections of the motorcycle tricks, and the wafts of baking cookies, pass by and become a memory pictured in the mind of every person that crosses paths with these few brittle minutes.

With gentle brushes like a tree branch against the siding of a home, the slight percussion adds flooring and texture to the walls, and Lawter continues to sing the air, the weather, the lighting right into the room.

This song connects the same way glimpses in time suddenly flash a memory you didn’t remember you lived. It’s the immediacy of nostalgia for something you haven’t felt, or thought about in years, and someone recounts a moment you lived, and a feeling of an experience comes back, and becomes something again.

There’s a safety in Lawter’s lyrics, from both parents giving focus to this motorcycle riding, there’s meaning to the pair paying attention. And the invitation to generously have a few cookies and, “come on in,” like the pathway back to somewhere bigger than the singer.

Lawter makes the invitation “Come on in,” into a place the listener is able to access as an entry point into a personal, momentary, lasting song.

We all come in, to witness a glimpse in time, and live inside of this tiny village for a few minutes, and share somewhere between 1 and 3 or 4 cookies off the tray on the counter.

Something unexpected delivered to the door in a cardboard box.

It’s a howl from the computer.

Daniel Juergens pursues sounds and scapes of creation that layer together like seeing a slice of cake placed against a glass wall.

Multiple angles and colors are soloing together into a swirl.

It’s familiar but not exactly expected. It’s a meal with a side unidentifiable, but tastes like everywhere and everything hoped for.

Sprinkles and spangles of moments and curved architecture.

Sounds to open a window to, just in case something unexpected happens.

(Mystery Circles)

Snooper makes music that sounds like getting chased around a car race by 1,000 race cars and you are riding on a lawnmower that has a chair.

Snooper drums sound like avalanches and the vocals sound like icicles forming like walrus teeth on the side of shed with a lock and all the keys melted.

Snooper plays guitars like they are in a fireplace and no one can get the flames to shut off.

Everything is going on and there’s no specific way to look at all of it at once.

So don’t.

Came across this album from an email, and couldn't trace what was happening to anything else.

In the desire to hear things that don’t remind me of anything, sound like anything else, stand alone in a saloon, this album took me right to that concept.

It’s a web of ways and words, corners of the room that aren’t one of the four.

It’s plucks of an acoustic or a drive underground.

It’s noises in the trees, on a screensaver.

It’s a collection of objects in a synthetic box.

Sounds that capture a place and time being created right here and now.

(Outer Grid)

Two Baltimore Brothers, move to LA and form this sound as a way to get somewhere.

What develops is a sound so good it just IS this.

The South Hill Experiment leans on nostalgia and pressing forward int he same instance.

Vocals painting the high points on a city block.

Bass driving along beats that need no explanation.

This is the sound of creating to gather and grow.

For something intended as a way in, this pair went ahead and just formed a whole new path and trail.

It’s stacks of items, sounds, moments, memories, and ideas all slathered with the cool sheen of exactly what it needs to be.

It’s a road trip to anywhere, but the destination never ends top being the point anyways.

Two tracks that hit like dynamite in a mailbox.

A flutter of violent birds rising from inside of a dying shrub.

Driving a city bus into a firework factory.

The gleam on a crocodile’s teeth.

A dagger in the dirt, right where the treasure is buried.

Buffalo’s Spaced shows up like a circle of commotion on a dark street, and the looming tightens and draws nearer until there’s no more room to breathe or look around.

(New Morality Zine)

OUR RVW: “A handful of buttons and minor objects caught throughout a day, that could be a Wednesday or a minor holiday, and a coin.”

There’s a definition line between the land and the beginning of the sky.

But that keeps changing based on what the line of the land looks like.

If the ridge is a little higher, the sky starts a little later.

If the range of mountains blanks out the sun, the sky starts even farther up the way.

Arianna Wegley writes songs somewhere in between that morphing line of unfolding land east and west, and the endless direction toward stars and planets in some sort of northward unknown.

For every hushed statement about Walgreens, “Confection of key lime,” and Elden Ring, there’s a levitating synthesizer sound, or scrubby guitar brandishing a dulled dagger in the midst of a thorn bush.

There’s a light and dark, up and down pattern to how everything collects together. The sound of rainwater gathering in a birdbath under the mask of victorious thunder escaping miles away to roll over roofs where the sun is still shining, for now.

The watching of a storm across the valley, just knowing what the afternoon will close in like.

Wegley, titled as a cellist first, created and arranged these songs in formations that Liam Moore and Todd Olson finished with bass and drums. Wegley carries the majority of instrumentation and vocals in a strangely alien development of sounds and textures in the midst of very, exceptionally normal observations and confessions of life passing right by. On “Window Seat,” the ending hits with some sort of vaporizing guitar as Wegley barely gets out, “in the/Window seat/with a view/You See me/I see you.” Just the bare minimum of description as to what occurs in the moment, but there’s no need for more. Wegley has a handle on singing, and describing in a way that feels concrete without a flower of a word in the pot. This is the dry ground being enough of a place to discover lost items and objects, as plants spark from under rock and fossil.

The ability to so perfectly place story and observation over the thicket of sound balances in a uniqueness that continues the walking trail like a tree lined biosphere of existence that reaches up from the floor into space and back. Space, a part of the reality, but no one knows what is happening deeper out there.

It’s standing on the edge of a boat in the middle of the sea with no idea all that’s existing just beneath the choppy waters. All the whale calls and flickering of fish that no one ever hears or sees.

The humility in the delivery of this album captures a level of excelling arrangements without needing to expand or bloat a single thing. It’s simple on purpose in the right ways. It doesn’t seek to be noticed, it’s good enough to be heard exactly how it is. The ribbons of synth and cello weave like a bowerbird collecting items for a home that matters and needs every detail, but maybe only other birds will notice.

There’s a theme in “space” sounds that allude to the name of the project, but doesn’t feel obvious or overdone. It’s a slicing through a piece of fruit to discover the rind, and the fruit itself, are opposite colors on a wheel that’s spinning.

“Close Call,” defines a level of what this music creates in reality with the words, “A window is a mirror playing tricks/Reflection’s a window/A window's a wall/The wall is made of bricks.

This is the sound of cool rain that washes the graffiti and grime off of walls and leaves a chill in the surfaces, a temperature to recover from, and the low fog that coats front doors and front lawns, and everything feels like it’s not exactly the way it actually is. It’s a mystery in the normality of things we watch pass by every day and never consider.

New Mexico’s, Javier Romero, soars like wings flapping through invisible breezes.

Everything works together in watching the clock and unfolding papers in the drawer.

Romero’s second GREAT album of 2023 arrives with songs that sound like the lines where states connect. A roadway between places that look similar, but with stories in multiple neighborhoods that blend together like a factual fable.

Electric guitar clean like soap, and a band of sounds that all land around Romero’s voice like the ending credits of a movie that had a plot that left everyone glad to have watched, and ready to sit in warm grass by a pond of gold.

Sumos are one of our favorite new bands we’ve discovered this year. Speeding from Manchester, UK, Sumos trims anything bloated or unnecessary from the branches and limbs, and steadily cuts tracks that sound like exactly what’s needed and nothing else.

Just the rocking horse. Forget the paint, forget the ornate details carved in the side, just swoop back and forth. Sit in the room and be exactly what’s needed.

This four-piece sets out and never stops.

It’s high paced and sounds like a freshly opened glass bottle in the gutter of somewhere everyone wants to go.

(Safe Suburban Home/Meritorio Records)

It’s a felt blanket with a pair of scissors cutting stars out.

It’s the softness of a rabbit’s fur emerging from a hovel in the side of a gentle green hill.

Steve Ciolek drives and steers these songs like a forklift moving blankets and millions of buttons with smiley faces on them across a warehouse painted in pastel and chalk.

The songs rip and shake, but something in the kindness of Ciolek’s delivery wraps any lyric in a cellophane of invisible yellow.

These are snack bag Ziploc’s full of memories, trinkets, and postcards of places no one ever gets to.

Just like Ciolek croons, “The loudest roar can be ignored.”

Listen to this and stop worrying.

(Lame-O Records)

Glasgow’s, Swiss Portrait, appears like a kite on winds tinged with pastel colors that hold a place in the landscape.

“Paper Houses” breathes like tiny lungs returning from a cloudy stroll around the block.

The development in melody and guitars slicing like a kitchen knife through a vegetable keep a fresh wash over everything as the song expands and divides under the lens of a microscope.

This new track continues Swiss Portrait’s success of endless streams of songs to listen to on repeat. Hanging in the wind like a kite that never comes back down.

OUR RVW: “There are so many people standing in the room, the frost on the yellowed window glass melted away, and dripped in the shape of a racecar on fire on the concrete.”

Sped up home videos for the soul purpose of reliving the magic of nostalgia-syrup-soaked moments, without losing too much time to it. Gunning through a yellow light to get to your hometown three minutes earlier.

Tom Brown the mastermind behind excellently named solo project, Teenage Tom Petties, has released, what we will call, a new EP, because if a single= more than 1 song, we consider it an EP. On this new two-song EP, Brown rummages through a laundry basket of brown and orange shirts in every cut. Looking for something that can reflect what has been, while speeding around the room like a tornado of heated up microwave meals.

“Posters,” carries the memory spiced songwriting Teenage Tom Petties excels at. With name drops from, “James Bond” and “E.T.” to “Beach Boys” and “Jay-Z,” Brown lists off the posters pinned to walls of past rooms. With a guitar lead that sounds like a magnet tracing a drawer of forks around the ceiling, and the drums buried under crispy layers of strumming and strumming, Brown allows less than two minutes to cruise through this ode to the selections of wall hangings that watched on as Brown grew up. The E.T. to Jay-Z pipeline exhibits the maturing of a person’s life through something so simply passed by, literally. The printed eyes of characters and famous people watching life spring past the need for said decorations.

“My First Beer,” a tribute to the moment Brown, “took a sip and found heaven,” froths like the top of that first taste. The drums driving as an undercurrent as Brown lightly sprinkles a voice staring off to that taste of amber and glass. The hook on this one, turns slightly and gently in a way that catches the ear whether the listener realizes it or not, because the oven mitt holding the hot dish is about to drop this smoking delight any second. Shatter and scoop it all up before it burns the ground.

The simplicity of the joke statement, “I remember my first beer,” paired with Brown saying, “It hasn’t been the same since then,” plays on the realities of how time passes, and what can be so new and exciting, mutes out as life can plateau into motions we simply go through. Brown somehow displays a depth of wisdom in reflection in ways that can pass by as quickly as entire weeks of life we live and never remember.

Teenage Tom Petties are truly one of our favorite bands in the world, and these two new songs exemplify only more of why. Tom Brown writes songs with such hurried perfection, creating more with a few seconds and fewer instruments. Anything Teenage Tom Petties writes only opens the door to hope more is on the way.

(Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home)

Graph paper colored into cells that make the bigger image of a cloud that never fits an identifiable shape.

That isn’t a horse. It’s stretched out like thin wool to something in between blue and white.

It’s the splotches of red and blue light sailing past everything on a highway that holds no one.

It’s the quiet of sand being moved in claw fulls for a horseshoe crab to find a place to rest.

It’s the peel of something citrus giving off the slightest perfume as it rests on a marble block.

It’s the strangeness of statues.

Bright as the sun.

Loud as the garbage truck emptying an entire vat of glass and bottle.

Hitting like a light in the backyard waiting to buzz a moth.

Moving like a waterslide inside of a train track tunnel.

Glowing like a handful of bioluminescent hornets.

Grand like a staircase that leads to a second floor that never got built.

Moving like a planet with eyes getting nearer and nearer as you run away on a path without any lights.

Beetles building a house no one can live in.

Tiny Voices play loud and expectedly intricate, but there’s a true delivery in every word. Nothing is modeled to be what it should be, it appears as genuine and meaningful in a way that won’t let up.

With guitars spindling like webs of wheat and wind, mixed with giant crashes of drum swells, and voices overlapping and overflowing to the very farthest places away from right here.

It’s songs that unravel and build all at the same time. Meaning and codes in the same envelope.

It bites like a dog behind the fence, and lands soft like the moonlight you can’t scoop up but sits in your hands.

(Thumbs Up Records)

OUR RVW: “Gold across the surface of the snow, the fingerprints of sun, relief from the storm, but too bright now to look directly at.”

The ice that holds form above the steel heave of sea water moves at paces akin to the frozen landscape it grips. Frozen edges on the waves lapping against the glittering, jutting peaks of invisible glare.

The relentless nature of the ocean’s power breaks against the staunch stance a berg would take. Without roots it COULD be moved, but the desperation of the muscle behind the sea water would have to be ratcheted to a seemingly Earth leveling pitch to budge the freeze. The moon would have to expand and pull with tighter ropes.

Reykjavík’s Anton Kaldal Ágústsson dabbles in the posture of bouncing patterns and notes against the strict gray of pad and texture that grates, just a little, like a violin bow scratching against strings to develop a tuned tone.

The shadowy background grips tighter as the brightness of the arpeggiation blooms and glows. A coming to terms with the brightness of the center of a distant star that can burn so wildly it can be identified up in the sky by a simple cornea and squint.

The equation, simple, effectively produces a rising peak, like witnessing the birth of a new mountain. The ice of the chords that jut in, icicles forming overnight, but appearing like monster’s teeth in the cold sun of the morning. The decay of single notes played over, sandwiched between the chords, and the arpeggiated rhythm swirl into a dizzying display of winter blue moving like a breeze that will eventually tear the cloth on a coat that’s been shielding against the distance from the sun for too many years.

Frosted above the top of the rising pitch of synthetic notes and pieces, Iceland’s DíSA sings, delivering a resolute understanding of ‘being,’ as the sounds of formation collect like a river at its busiest turn, before fading back out like the arms of a tributary fully able to take in all the rushing from a few miles up in the forest.

The song, a snapshot of existence in layers, coats and jackets and shirts, and sleeves, and drying by the fire, and watching the power of a storm that can’t be contained, can’t be shifted. Unless there could be some power like that weather research center HAARP that works to blast the atmosphere with beams of manipulation that change how clouds form, change how weather patterns develop. And in that, could a monsoon never leave? Could a sky never break? Could the sun be masked by cold, forever?

Coated in chrome and aluminum foil, the depths of the buildings being built closer and closer together traps the pockets of summer air no matter how late the night gets. Surges of scarred streets layer into bridges, into tunnels, that lead out to where mountains become landscapes wider than anything man-made could ever attempt.

(Hessle Audio)

Play “see spirits,” and try not to fall directly into the gaping door in the ground.

It’s a balance of sound and voice that wraps like paper around everything only to be torn back open and rewrapped with new patterns.

Everything falls like drops from clouds from skies outside of our sky.

OUR RVW: “Developing film in a bath of chemicals that create, like microscopic hands, tiny images over the original moment caught by the camera.”

A “tangent” crosses near a circular shape, touches the edge of said circle, but does not intersect with it. It passes by the exterior, and continues off on a trajectory all its own, expanding away from any center, or from being drawn into the familiar boundaries of rounded objects.

The space between familiar shapes lying flat on a plane form a shape all its own, maybe identified like the sea between tiny island chains. The moving surf that erodes the archipelago. Somewhere between spider legs connected to a creature fifty feet high, and the watery surface of unknowns where urchins and invisible fish inhabit, swirling in tides beyond their control.

Mercedes Maresca designs and sculpts sound and program in textures familiar like a line passing right up next to a known circle, while also allowing the long, hollowed tree trunk notes, plucked from an upright bass, to land over the top of a synthesis of melody and voice that plod like a bear returning from a hibernation to a spring of slow footsteps, and live drums painting the dirt path that leads to a stomach full of berries in the bramble.

There’s an amalgamation here of analogue and synthetic, front row and secondary. For the wasp wing voice crooning over opening track “Leku,” there’s the synthesized pattern of rainforest tones leaking out of a computer monitor on “Shiru.”

Maresca, masked behind the project title Tydblik, constructs and composes from a place directly between momentary movement on an instrument held in hands that open doors, and greet other people, and stir food, while pursuing the “immediacy of midi technology,” in a stew that steams and streams, organizing baseline patterns that become overlayed with a momentary choice to draw accentuated melodies over the top like a graph paper arch built above a naturally occurring entrance to a garden where the hedges reach their capacity of expansion and form a gap to walk through.

Closing track, “Verby,” holds a steady drum beat right front and center. It sounds like a live show where the drummer gets placed where the lead singer would historically stand. Maresca mutters, singing, “Lessons learned from the past,” an aggravated synthesized guitar like sound blares from the sides of the stage, before arpeggiated pattern moves in between like a channel opened between continents. Flowing water, moving upward.

These songs sound like an overhead projector shining against a concrete wall, a slide of text lands on the glass and words in giant font sprawl across the cold surface of the room. But then a second slide of text gets placed horizontally across the center of the first slide, sideways, now there is text moving like normal from left to right, while second texts fall from top to bottom like steam spewing from a speaking cloud. The pattern on the wall can be identified as MADE of text, but not a legible writing to be digested, learned and considered. It’s a tapestry of slants and letters and bits of vocabulary blurred by strict landscapes of letters above letters.

In the matter of four tracks, Tydblik delivers a recipe for song and sound that challenges the directness of where sounds go, and how they should be perceived as the Venn diagram of natural and synthetic meet in the center, but the identification of similarity in the middle is just tan and brown and burnt orange hues scribbled in unison to fill that entire center shape.

The challenge in these songs comes not from the improvised moments, not in the computerized blasts, not in the drums waiting to be unpenned like a bull behind bars. It’s in the gravitating toward something familiar. A tone, a melody, a human voice. If there is too much leaning forward toward one piece, the song will be missed, because the movement keeps moving, and there is not enough time for a rest stop, or gaze in a single direction.

It's the conversation you find yourself locked into, where the person speaking to you develops a thought that becomes a tangent, and begins rifling a memory, a story, a quip that becomes a history, and the thread pulling away from the beginning becomes the ending point, and then the initial conversation becomes lost in the lapping wave of half an hour ago.

U.S. Highball somehow captures a sound of joy like a distilled beverage in a clear bottle.

Here we are again, with the team lifting clouds up a little higher.

A song that references bagels, in between a chorus so catchy that with less than two minutes, Calvin and James will drill this into your memory in one listen and you’ll hum it for the rest of the week.

U.S. Highball is back again, and we always need more of what they deliver!

(Lame-O Records)

What if shapes and geometries were more than angles and curved lines. What if tangents were tangible on planes outside of places.

Can you think like that?

What if the landscape was inside of the screen, but the screen is inside of the mind you created on the screen?

Where do the keypads rest? Can you type in the codes to unlock more color? More texture?

Christian Gates has decoded and unfolded every piece of this vessel moving like a warship through dots and dashes.

Ring the bell. Let it pass through the reality you think you know.

(Machine Records)

The warmth of the afternoon sun on a patch of beige carpet in the living room.

The warmth of a knife across the scratch of toast.

Foster Powell sings just above a brittle whisper with something familiar like the fireplace in the house you grew up in, but the smoke changes color as it curls out of the top of the chimney.

Gentle guitar parts, and acoustic strums sparkle alongside microscopic details in chime and soft drums.

An album to listen to when your parents show you the photo album of what really unfolded to get this house built. Handshakes and smiles, glasses of water and tiny trails that all led to a place that comfortably never fully felt like home.

Atlanta’s Vessel drives from the bass line that begins these 2 minutes and never stops.

The guitars and saxophone travel at different altitudes.

The continual notes dripping from the electric guitar create a door cover like long strings of reflective confetti.

There’s a pause in the song which feels like an ending that smashes into a wall. But then Vessel picks it all back up and runs 10 more feet, and then smashes into the wall.

It’s a quick song that sounds exactly right, and really doesn't need another second.

Tumbleweeds dried out into powder.

A step ladder to a shelf full of empty jars.

Detached garage behind the house, overflowing with borrowed tools, and a car that hasn’t been uncovered in a decade.

Moving like a heatwave across a cold beach, Vista House grapples with the heavy sand of the past, while breezing over the top and edges of everything on this new track, “King of Rock ‘N’ Roll.” With guitar strums and Tim Howe’s arrow-out-of-the-bow voice, shooting directly, while recalling and calling out in some kind of shrugged shoulder, thumbs up or thumbs down, dependent on the moment, and who is standing in the frame of the lyrics.

To us Tim Howe and Nathan Tucker, two members of this project are KINGS of music projects that seem to spill over every edge of these people’s lives. Every time we go diving for new music, these names seem to emerge as pieces and parts of many musical endeavors, and everything they create/work on sounds like gleaming gold. This is yet another moment to celebrate new music from these brilliant minds, while bringing in some excelling members in Andy Rusinek on guitar and Al Nelson on drums.

The way this team moves in simple displays of musical prowess while directing a line straight to the middle of the lake, returns in image and memory waving in the wind on the pond.

Howe told us, “This song is about running into people from high school during the holidays. It's an ode to old friendships and the ones you'd rather forget.”

From some girl possibly named Rachelle (?), to Dan the “King of Rock and Roll,” all the way to the old Quarterback, now current telemarketer, Howe reflects on what was, and what has become through the lens of running into the scope of people that for a handful of life matter more than they should have, and now dissolve into the background of what never changes.

The line in the pre-chorus:

“And I wish this little mountain town could see us now/I love it when you tell ‘em that we’ll show ‘em how/we’ve grown, up and out, UP AND OUT!”

feels like the most honest assessment of people that stand in the observation tower of life, watching the rest become what it will, while blooming and growing into full fledged livers of the life that happens after the early, flimsy part. Actually making a name for themselves, while humbly watching the past continue passing.

Vista House directs this view into the past, stretched out from the standpoint of the future in a curt, straight forward guitar strumming choir of celebratory, “REALLY LIVING.” Howe and Rusinek work together to direct continual landscapes in every guitar part the way a row of mesas disappear into the haze of the desert down at the end of field of vision. The flash of a guitar solo woven together ends the song with one more excellent decision, before letting it all rest. Al Nelson, steadily keeps the beat, never overdoing it, just creating the room for everything to make a place and land well. Nathan Tucker carries the low-end with bass lines a cut above a place holder, working with Nelson to give Howe all he needs to soar ‘up and out.’ Tucker also accentuates the second half of the song with some saxophone that slides in like a water bird landing without a splash, and sailing like fins across the glass of a lake.

When the celebration of the choir at the end jumps to the top and Angie Fritz joins on backup vocals, the whole of the band, and everything this song has been building towards, feels like the little mountain town reaches the top of the rocks and crags and floats above the peak, so maybe EVERYONE gets perspective for just a second.

(Anything Bagel)

Reupholster the arm chair. Cut a pattern and shape that fits the skeleton of the furniture like a small sized suit.

Vienna, Austria’s, Voyage Futur, tailors like a measuring tape and scalpel with padded scopes of sound as the dense fog from the overnight rain dissipate into clean grass green as freer memories.

The VHS tape floating face up in the crystal lagoon was your only way back to the memories you are starting to forget.

Run the tap through a conditioner of extraction to retrieve the revived, recolored story you can’t seem to tell anymore.

Imagine the names of paint colors at the hardware store are the states inside of a country that sits on a sea of murky, teal, unidentifiable solutions and mixtures.

Imagine creatures crawl and float with bubble wings and eyes watching from every angle.

Imagine trees that grow down into the ground and all we see are roots in the vibrance of neon, tropical fruits.

Imagine bugs that don’t sting, but walk like giants through the barren landscape of everything moving underground.

Imagine clouds that move like city buses over the edges of the land.

Imagine voices measuring space like echolocation.

(VILL4IN)

No other song, this year, starts as perfectly as this one. It’s a direct line from those first acoustic strings, and the voice circling the bottom of a tin mug, all the way through the not even three minutes that pass by the somber guitar solo of fingers that have dug for treasure without a shovel. The cold dirt still hanging on.

(Run For Cover)

OUR RVW: “The cabinet where the sugar and the salt are stored.”

Fizz off the top of a sparkling drink foams and babbles for a momentary glimpse of the evening sun, before dissolving into the aluminum ring.

The thin, bubbly froth evaporating with the tiny scent of citrus or berry.

A lime as a ghost.

The fuzz of the electric guitar forms the range this single lives within. It doesn’t scald or singe, but rather places itself like bare feet trying to walk quickly across summer heat held in the asphalt.

Everything sounds and feels drawn up to the front of the recording. A scape of white wicker chairs ringed around the ears as the members of Whitney’s Playland all relax and strum stings and shake shakers out into the sap of warm afternoons.

Band leaders Inna Showalter and George Tarlson guide with a certain careless shrug, while most obviously directing every piece of the sound and feel to allow for breezes and reflections to inhabit the space all around the songs core.

The chord progressions move simply and steadily as percussive shakes and cymbal splashes develop around the hook, “I know, I know, the plants you want to grow.”

It’s a simple equation to stretch and extend the sound into somewhere familiar, and uniquely hushed like a table in the corner of a room with a lamp painted with scenes of memories. Yet, after the light gets switched on, most nights no one notices or recounts what was meticulously etched across the stand. Just the light is utilized without thinking twice about all the hues and color.

Whitney’s Playland structures “Sunset Sea Breeze” in a way that no one can miss, no one can bypass, no one can get out of their heads. The simplicity of Inna Showalter’s melodies are perfected in hooking the brain with a relentless net. The acoustic and electric guitar meld around one another as a texture rather than separate instruments. The cool of the shakers rattle around the metronome to keep everything loose.

All around this song is something to dial in on an old radio, set in the sun, and drift up into the clouds. The sound will follow.

(Meritorio/Paisley Shirt)

Charms, like silver sided vegetation growing out from every angle of the ground finally ready for the warmer months.

There’s an invisible line in the air tracing from one season to another.

Cool waters circling around the items left on the concrete when the rains started.

Reunion, a forest opening its eyes in the middle of the morning.

(LAAPS)

Worry Club dropped two of these tracks, “Nothin” and “Bored,” earlier this year, and they immediately excelled into our focus beyond mostly anything else.

Here’s a band that keep the songs short, and the song crafting perfect.

It’s hook after hook in the direction of heated up guitars and driving moments that lend themselves to the Chase Walsh’s uniquely reflective voice that responds to each moment with sincerity and willingness to let the landscape of the big sounds and threads of biting guitar work not overtake purpose.

It’s a quick master class in how an EP could be delivered in such a way that anyone could listen and enjoy.

Put on “Sucker Punch,” and run a million miles in any direction. Something brilliant will be there when you finally stop to take a breath.

OUR RVW: “Cooling, blue magma, formed like a sleeping snake around the feet of a second-hand couch.”

The delivery of every word trimmed from the complete sentences sung by Chase Walsh, appear and float around the speed of the rest of the band, like uncertainty wrapped in paper with microscopic patterns. It’s a textured delivery that allows for concepts like boredom to deliver completely, while holding a finger in the page of the entire novel. There’s more here than a quick, well-crafted song. It’s an exploration in allowing the band to trapse across a musty living room, TV blaring some midday show, and the sun heating the windows, drawing on feelings not simply starting and stopping at “boredom.” The elongation of a day has no home on this new track from Chicago’s, Worry Club. With steady drums continually pounding against the door of anything that would lead to a subtle uninterest, bass tip toes along with every hit. Guitars scratch, wail, pour out into the room, like a backwards vacuum refilling every space with sparkling dust and something that was stuck, now unstuck, getting stuck again, or moving like a river of objects.

The stacks of sound pile up on the sides of the room and Walsh, with an eye like a falcon keeps the focus, the unbreakable stare out the window, at the more that could be if the drums could just knock down that door, finally.

Worry Club sounds to have a directness in execution that makes a single like this, or recent track, “Nothin,” carve an exact shape, with intention and purpose that makes a repeat listen a necessity, and then just keep these songs on endless listen.

Everything here works as one sound, a unity in driving from start to finish. The jaunts of guitar notes in the intro move and hit like scissors on a brand-new sheet. The guitar work molds like decoration atop the stern cake of depth and rhythm that form the layers under the crust of the carpet and vinyl flooring.

This is easily the most interesting song ever written about boredom. A leaning in to excellently utilizing every tool to collect pieces in one motion that relentlessly sounds like everything a song can be, while dealing through what isn’t glittering. We need more songs from Worry Club.

OUR RVW: “Cranking up the sails to catch a heavy load of wind that turns into iron blocks that sink the ship entirely.”

There are policies in life circling the value and weight of a measurement.

The impact of mass and amount.

A drop of water relieves the parched throat of a vulture.

A billion drops overwhelm and rot a house.

A fingernail of fire burns on the end of a wick.

A fistful sets off the rotted home into blaze.

A second loses so quickly.

Hanging on to one last moment goes by before there’s enough time to make anything out of it. Lengths of time structure life into what becomes valuable.

Connecticut’s, Wreckage, flips this concept in immediacy, using every-single-moment to weigh heavy without ever taking too much of any resource.

On the first day of 2023, Wreckage appeared with a 7-track EP that hits like a hot fist against a steel sign in the middle of winter. Every song driving like a 40-foot drill directly through the side car or tree on thew street.

Delivering direct blow after blow, the battle ensues from the kick-off of “Searching For Soul,” and never relents, like holding breath underwater for just a little too long, when the gasp arrives, the air refills, the panic grips heavy.

The management of every part, every piece, that creates these songs arrive so perfectly fleshed out that the realization that Wreckage delivered all 7 tracks in 11 minutes throws the whole of the value of time, from earlier, into the fire of a single flame, and it all burns up so quickly the only reasonable response is to start “Our Time” back at the beginning, and let the assault retread back across the same landscape you just watched get leveled.

The desperation on “Way To Survive,” of the actual shouting, “A way to survive,” smashing up against the side of the tunnel of a momentary guitar solo makes the speed and concern tangible. A wide-eyed rodent running from the predator in the dark with claws ripping the night into shreds.

With every song under 2 minutes, just when the listener might begin to nod along to a certain part, it either ends, or moves on. There have been multiple times, over the course of listening through, that I start nodding into what I think will happen next, only to be reminded that Wreckage ends the song here, never letting anything drag on, or even change up enough to move to a second part. The longest “part” on this EP is the introduction of the first song as Wreckage appears from some ‘scratching on a window’ guitar feedback, before building up in tom rolls and elongated chords, then marching up into the tower that the rest of the EP looks down from.

Finally, the snare rolls in just past one minute, to set this cloud of locusts loose, and the bits of aluminum and steel fly full force into the eyes of anyone looking on.

From there, the hammer in the hand begins building, or scrapping, and hits like walls falling in endless symmetry.

Wreckage works for maximum impact without overdoing anything. Without stretching anything out. There’s a concise vision in delivering and never trying. A presentation of exactly how and what Wreckage wants to convey, without cloying to get anyone into it. You’re either in or out, and Wreckage doesn’t care what you choose, they have to move on.

The ferocity reaches the peak in the midst of, “Days On Hold.” A terror in future casting as aimlessness works like a room full of clocks all dialing in different times before rushing out of the room, and out of time frame itself.

On “Our Time,” the final moments are a calling of, “When all the smoke is clear, we’ll still be standing here,” and the abrupt end impacts like a planet hit by a bigger planet.

(Scheme Records)

Everything is everywhere in the room.

Look for the lock, it’s already unlocked.

Chula Vista, California’s, Yzu, maximizes it all to capture beams of light and blasts like invisible dynamite.

The steadiness of the structure continues morphing as synthesizers, hand claps and big beats melt the sides of everywhere into a new habitation.

Run without ceasing.

There’s nowhere to stop.

It’s pointing on a map and your finger becomes a hand becomes a spider walking across everywhere.

(everjoysound)