PICK OF THE DAY

Stacks of fabric melded with overwhelming designs in swirling and sparkling patterns piled like towers in a city made of blocks of wood from trees no one has ever seen before.

Grumpy’s new single sounds anything but lonesome. It’s an overwhelming adjustment of every additive and angle playing at once in synchronicity while it all sounds like it’s leaking in different directions at the same time. The drums are cackling along. That kick drum clicking like a boot kicking time itself forward. The masses of melody in chemical synthesis and bass dipping down like spoons from the hand of a new moon. It’s a collaboration of every frequency becoming its own shape, glowing on an organically grown screen. A garden of cell phones developing from the ends of real vines.

Sidney Gish and Precious Human sing like they’re both watching a documentary while the recording is running. Something vacant up close because the focus follows shapes in the distance. But it’s exactly the way the vocals need to slash the layers to continue the piled up sounds. It’s like a field of spires with vocal swords slicing them into new shapes and pieces so the field only expands.

It’s a sound and a song without a formal explanation. There is no need for explanation because the song is programmed to be the only knowledge in the room understanding how this all runs and works together.

It isn’t lines of wires as much as moments selected on a touch screen and then scrambled together in a perfected portrait of someone no one has ever seen.

I heard a fact once that you can’t think of a face unless you’ve seen it before. Your brain cannot make up a face, it’s based on a face you’ve passed by somewhere. This song is that concept being broken. It isn’t a song mirroring anything that’s been passed by before. It’s the dust of stars stirring into underground tunnels dug by glow worms in the middle of a never ending night on a planet with a face no one has ever seen.

Don’t try to explain it, just listen to it.

At the end of this song, the chorus breaks out one more time. The song could have already ended, but Brown Horse kindly allows for one more. It’s the kind of chorus you either get to hear here at the very end, or you’ll just start the song again so you can get back to it.

A quick blast of melody and words that so perfectly twine together in a perfected place that could just keep playing on loop. But that would be to miss out on the rest of this wriggling, wavering, press forward.

Where the first verse starts in a muted brown and orange, the baton hand off on the chorus blasts the song open like a screen door off the hinges.

The electric guitars startle like lightning that comes inside.

The keys and bass cool the temperature just enough that skeletons don’t actually just jump out of anyone’s skin. Brown Horse sound like they know exactly how to make this song that it sounds more like a house than just a single.

The dual vocals close together like lamplights in a cave. The speed and volume like every furnace and television and alarm clock all piled together in some kind of celebration to warm things up right in the center of the living room.

That chorus line, “Every tide takes a little more of the shore,” signifies something golden and meaningful but in the hands of that melody sounds less heaving and more realistically possible to sing along to.

This group comes together in an exact space and time that sounds both like a laboratory grown perfection and the most relaxed, easy group meeting at the same time. The play of the verse and chorus being tossed back and forth and then combined like animals running along the sides of a fence until the fence comes to an end and nothing was ever fully closed in.

This starting place for the forthcoming Brown Horse album is the exact kind of single to stir an excitement and immediacy. Listen through to that last chorus, but you’ll start the song right over when it ends.

(Loose Music)

The album cover is the entry point to what scowls under the surface of every song on “II.” The listener is the cake with bulging eyes staring up at the knife. The chef is Bassano Del Grappa, Italy’s Luigi Pianezzola. The knife are these 11 tracks. Pianezzola’s entire vision for TORBA is to create music incorrectly. To push against perfection, and make rash decisions that will be archived forever in the bounds of songs that aggravate and tumble like wiring electricity backwards so the opportunity for sparks to blow the system is on purpose. When Pianezzola yells out on “DARE,” before the song begins fainting in its own stead, is an exact picture of the terrified tension created as these songs unravel.

The core is built on synths as uncomfortable chairs, and the beats are patterned as rooms too dark, with broken thermostats, to sit in. It’s the overwhelm of strobe lights relentlessly painting a windshield so it’s impossible to see if anything is up ahead.

TORBA plays as an experiment in driving everything to extreme limits without losing sight of creating in a way that challenges, but doesn’t stiff arm the listener away from wanting to hear what’s next.

It’s multiple patterned fabrics in the same spin cycle whirring into a chaos of one image in the suds and spilling guts of water flooding everything. After the initial coding and keying of “PRELUDE,” bounces to a close, “DEAL,” speaks the repeated line “It’s not a big deal,” as the introduction to what becomes the burden of an album the listener is now trapped inside of. It’s a suffocating experience of broken bass sounds and raging drums that never relent. Even when things simplify or come down a bit, there isn’t any exit unless you stop the album.

The moments after a nightmare when reality can’t yet be understood.

“CADUTA,” spins and blips like beetles trying to access a keypad. The beat reformulates the way the song seemed to be going quickly, and the continued footsteps only become more ominous when the bass hides in the background like a dead sun, behind a mountain, that won’t rise.

“INTERLUDE,” moves with more life than entire other entries in the confusion of the changing tide that can’t decide if it’s coming to the shore or rolling the sea up.

Pianezzola has a vision to allow sound to become its own landscape on top of all the other landscapes already turning and unfolding. It’s a place where decisions get made to allow things to be pushed past regular limits, and then stay that way forever.

The concept of making a monstrous face and it staying that way, but it actually does stay.

A navigation process without any way to find closure or understanding. Just limits flicking like lighters that won’t shut back off, millions of them in a room of dried, manufactured branches.

There is nothing remotely organic in this music. It’s additives and preservatives and synthetic materials forced to be food.

The final three tracks work as companion pieces in a brochure on ominous habitats. Synth lines turning corners into basements under basements. Pacing past a mile marker only to return to it to try to find an arrow pointing to the way out. There is no way. Endless paths connected by endless paths.

It’s a spoon in an aquarium trying to catch a piranha with metal teeth. It’s looking in a mirror for what’s behind you and it’s you standing behind yourself. It’s a tv of channels with shows of days you lived but everything is reversing and speeding forward without explanation and changing what the present is becoming or has been until right now.

Right as 2025 started Perth, Australia’s Ghoulies floated in like an anvil full of fireworks and sucked all the air out of the year. With Indigo Foster-Tuke spilling the keys of a synthesizer all over these bullet-sized songs in shrill scrapes that move like lightning through neon, Ghoulies splatter everything everywhere.

Alex Patching keeps the pace of the songs running like the heat of a rifle with drum beats so sped up it sounds like a cartoon in fast forward. This is a horror movie in fast forward so the viewer can never quite tell what it was that hid in the dark. Alec Thomas drives the album with vocals that crank the dial from a swarm of fleas devouring a dog with a fever, to the lower register of talking and yelling at the same time. The kind of sharpness a voice may carry at the experience of a fender bender.

One thing Ghoulies lands in every track is the balance of high speed busyness with hook after hook of the catchiest stand alone minutes on a planet made of worried parties. It sounds like Ghoulies are having an absolute blast and not waiting or worrying for anyone to get into the songs with them. They are doing exactly what they want.

“Low I.Q.” gives four seconds at the beginning to pool up like a flash flood and then the song launches down a water slide of high speed bumps and a knife somewhere in the water.

“TRC” kicks off with the synthesizer responding to the patterns of the rest of the band and a continuous spiral around that keyboard bouncing back and forth.

Ghoulies never quiet down, but somehow hold a dynamic to make things louder and more chaotic without adding much to what’s already happening. It just keeps crushing down, sprinting forward, all while sounding like a bunch of balloons slowly sliding out of a glove.

The drum roll into “Self-Help,” is a perfected look at Ghoulies ability to map something seemingly so simple, but with a crisp view of exactly how to develop sheer minutes without losing out on anything and never needing to add more to the quick blast. There isn’t time for extra ideas or breaths, just run the course once and move on.

“Black Tarp” buzzes along without any vocals, and the nausea of the synth moving like melting stairs walks alone without help. It’s the core of the inside of the grenade that makes the explosion.

The closer, “Magnetic Scum,” is the only song that takes longer than 2 minutes to listen through. It’s a devolving dip into the sewer system beneath the road. Alec Thomas’ continual bass handling  drives the album without any need to be noticed, but on this final track somehow makes the steps down, stand out as the cornerstone of the close. The band unites for one longer drill through the wall before ending this triumph.

“Shafted By The Algorithm,” ends as quickly as it started, but over the 12 tracks that burn like moth wings in a torch more occurs and can be heard than can be registered quickly enough. It’s a high speed lesson for the biggest brain waves to take in.

(Erste Theke Tontraeger)

The guitars on this track sound like something made of sugar, toasted by subtle flame. There’s a curl of smoke in the midst of every chord and note puncturing the steadiness of drums and bass that move like a memory floating on the top of quiet waters. This song is a door swinging wide open and the hinges are the guitar riff. Notes dazzling like a shoe tumbling over the side of a waterfall.

And there’s the title, a word I don’t know that I’d ever considered until I heard this song. Something covered in sparkling, lit up points and periods. Like punctuation made of otherworldly moments of distinction. The type of uncatchable seconds when a disco ball throws its guts around a tall room.

Fust sounds like a photograph trying to be taken, but more and more people keep piling in to be a part of the image. Everyone keeps smiling and waiting and the time isn’t annoying to anyone. Just waiting here for a long moment to be captured and it’ll always be captured now.

Aaron Dowdy sings like taking confident gulps of wind, whimpers of something in the forest using tools to craft something new, but still naturally a piece of the terrain. A bowerbird curving a wing to put the roof on.

Fust unspools like feet up on a coffee table at a sweltering house party. Someone open that door and let the points of light from outside fill tiny spaces all over the room. The sun can rise, the sun can set, but Fust will keep piling into the frame, and allow every moment to just be as it is, and capture it with those guitars that are toasted in place forever now.

(Dear Life Records)

I have this interest in the concept of A-B testing. The experimenting of two different forms of content or two different concepts presented to groups of people to develop an understanding of what will be gravitated toward. What sells better. It’s a back channel planning to draw people toward something with a deeper purpose of gain. A utilization of presentation with an intention for drawing out information the subjects may never realize has happened to them. But suddenly items, or services appeal back to the test subjects without realizing they answered the question to begin with.

Ben Seretan does not partake in this experimenting, but presents two sides of one mind in forms of music that could be considered polar choices. The only difference is the system in which all of Seretan’s creation works flows in one channel, right in front of any listener that plays any song.

A direct example of this separate but braided pairing is the canyon between what happens on last year’s torch in the middle of the biggest field you’ve ever seen of “Allora,” and here now on the first single of a fresh album. “they wanna hear another heater” speaks through the title in this mindset of maybe someone picking Seretan’s world up for the first time in the guitar churning, wailing and wobbling of all that “Allora” splashed and mashed across the canvas, and then there’s this wide open void of something entirely different on this new single.

It sounds like the first 5 seconds are silent. Only sounds like that. There’s something pooling like the foot of a microscopic germ testing the temperature of lake water. And as that micro ripple develops into a mass of miniature piano notes and sounds that hang in the air like a fog that can’t wash away, Seretan builds a new city on the other side of the world. A cold city. A humid city. A city without any addresses, exactly. “they wanna hear another heater” glides in like the silence of just the wing on a plane landing at night and the lights are blinking out the window, but the wing doesn’t flap, or swivel, just let’s down easy, so people can pile out of the cabin and into cars and houses and beds and chairs and restaurants and booths and conversations and never think about that wing again. Off somewhere else, letting people go somewhere else.

The most intensely important piece of Seretan’s sound, and development of that sound, is that whether there is singing like the bottom of a boat about to capsize, or the soft sounds of pianos and breath and distant birds and a through line of humming, it is all inside of the system that isn’t about A and B, or which side of Seretan you like better. It’s about how all of this is continuing to pile into one single monument that we don’t yet fully realize. It’s only in Seretan’s head, in the climb, in the structuring, and right now we’re looking out over a valley that’s teeming with life less visible at first glance, but happening all the same. Just look down a little longer. Or up. Find a wing going somewhere inside of this.

(Sound As Language)

Spain’s Elena Nieto consistently creates melodies that gleam atop guitars and drums kicking like the legs of rabbits running from something bigger. It’s a steady pace of unrelenting perfection in hooks that echo off the walls once the song ends. After the straight line of direct hits on 2022’s, “Duplo,” whatever would come next would expectedly stay steady in easy tracks that sound like the tallest buildings reflecting the brightest sun.

Beginning 2025, Yawners (the name Nieto puts these frosted bashers out under) drops a new track titled “1 de enero,” translated: January 1st. A year starter that drops into immediate contention as one of the best songs I’ll probably hear this year.

“1 de enero,” deals through the end of a relationship and the changing of a new year. It may be a fresh start, but the past is still the spectered hand holding on to somewhere in the background that never fully fades. The concept Nieto drills to on the chorus works in the mindset that she has no interest in responding to a past relationship in any way, but still wants to kiss this broken up person at midnight on New Year’s Eve. A conflicted scaling of chipped edges gripping somewhere it shouldn’t be able to hold on to.

Guitars chug along like a car idling outside on a cold day. Drums hit like a snare a thousand feet tall, and Nieto harmonizes with her own voice in easy gusts of January chill coming in through the crack in the window. The bass tone itself is worth listening to the song for, but the way it runs a bit up and down around the frame of the chorus makes for a low end shifting like a single tectonic plate moving when this relationship ended. Nieto sings with the steady confidence of someone who has this whole picture masterminded and implements every angle needed to make yet another immediate track, as up close as it can be in exactly what anyone wants to hear.

The chiming in the background as the chorus is sung out over and over to the end holds a certain pain in the ringing. The year is new, the old is following, and the this song is smashing through the side of a wall that once meant something to someone that can’t be back in this same room ever again…most likely.

(Counter Intuitive)