Favorites this week:
Aubrie Sellers - Far From Home (Aubrie Sellers)
As its title suggests, this album is largely about leaving home to wander. It begins with one bisection of that emotional experience (a wistful missing of a place and time you’re connected to via an uncountable number of metaphysical threads) and ends with its flipside (fuck these people, I’m out). On the former, “Far From Home,” Sellers gives a gentle, beautiful vocal performance covered in hazy layers of reverb. The most obvious (and probably overstated) touchstone here is Kacey Musgraves, and yes, Sellers is also an ethereal, stoned, and broadly-influenced modern country singer, and there are vocal similarities. Where Musgraves’ country veers hard toward pop, though, Sellers’ brand, while also poppy, tends toward rock. At times, like on “My Love Will Not Change,” a duet with Steve Earle, or “Drag You Down,” which starts with an honest-to-goodness scream, she’s a lot heavier than folks might expect from a pop country heiress. “Troublemaker", with its noise intro and shouty chorus, is surely as noisy and psychedelic as it’s possible for country pop to get. There are a lot of surprising touches on this, like the trippy Syd Barrett-esque lead guitar and piercing…theremin(?!) on “Going Places,” but for all its experimentation, it’s still undeniably country music. On “Under the Sun,” Sellers sweetly conjures a steel guitar by singing its name, and “One Town’s Trash” chugs along like a twangier “Running Down a Dream.” This is just a solid, lovely release from someone who is clearly a true blue music fan and artist. If you think you like country, but only know Kacey and Dolly, please take this wonderful opportunity to get into something else.
Thomas Köner - Motus (Mille Plateaux)
Motus sounds like you’re deeply submerged in the ocean in a malfunctioning submarine. Through the glitching and static of the machinery, your ears occasionally discern a distant beat; it’s increasingly unlikely that you’ll reach this abyssal rave alive. With song titles that are often sonic terms with double meanings related to struggle and death (like “attack” and “sustain” and “decay”), and a drowned binaural throb that becomes increasingly cardiac, Motus connects the beat to survival, but separates it from us under a mountain of faulty tech. “Sustain” sounds like information trying to come through a device that wasn’t built to handle its magnitude. The record feels like a brother to Vladislav Delay’s recent Rakka, but with more slow-burn desolation and doom than out-and-out brutality. “Substrate” oscillates from ear to ear with two underlying pulses that seem to change speeds and dip in and out of sync with one another, reaching a disorienting peak that, despite all its dissonance and otherworldliness, seems not impossible to imagine being played and danced to in a club. Truly dance music for the end times.
Elements of Joy - PI08 (Pi Electronics)
Starting out with sustained, droney squelching and a dude hollerin’ like Mark E. Smith through a DS-1, this new Pi Electronics joint makes its identity known from the jump: this is hard hitting, heavily distorted, experimental techno. Elements of Joy is the noisy, industrial project of French techno dj UVB, and it’s packed with harsh synth pads and barely discernable vocals. The whole squelchy, droning, fuzzy affair sounds processed and reprocessed, the audio equivalent of an image reused and compressed until it’s artifacted to unrecognizability. Toward the middle of the record, we pivot to a slightly more ethereal sound, with foggy synth layers built on top of the earlier clamor, but the project’s central identity holds. Though PI08 is a marked departure from the more straight-laced clubby techno of UVB, this does sound a bit like he took his previous work and ran it though an Industrializer machine, but I’m not mad at all about it. In sum: droney and strange, but not without bangers; sinister, but fun.
Other stuff released this week:
Bannwald/Uruk-Hai/Drudan Forest - Kingdoms Long Gone (Antiq Records)
Kingdoms Long Gone is a three way split between Austrian and Finnish black metal projects who are obsessed with Lord of the Rings, and if that sounds absurd to you in any way, I’d like to invite you to navigate to a different website. (Full disclosure: I was initially interested in this because it was listed as coming from Angers, France, which is where Les Thugs are from. It’s with immense regret that I report only the label is based in Angers.) We start off with Bannwald, who offer a trio of songs that sound extremely similar to one another: stripped down, Might and Magic VI dungeon synth with slow, echoey timpani and keyboard presets for harp and pipe. Secondly, we get Uruk-Hai, who immediately sound more substantive and varied than Bannwald, with added subtlety and a broader sonic palette — some industrial clanging, some spacey, etheral moments here and there. “Orkish Hymn” incrementally builds, though, to a rather boring place. Synthesized voices intone predictably, triumphant horn presets evoke the soundtracks of sub-par movies about how rad space exploration is, and we are entered against our will into a disorienting game of “pick a key.” “Birth of an Uruk-Hai” is similarly corny, but ends with synthesized harp and pipe against sounds of rain and thunder, and it’s really lovely — until an earlier part re-enters, bafflingly, after a far-too-long pause that surely every listener thought/hoped was the end of the track. Finally, we reach Druadan Forest’s twenty minute “Tuhat Tähteä Ikuisuuden Viitassa," which I’m happy to report is extremely my shit (unsurprisingly, it’s the Finnish one of the three that kicks ass). It’s thoughtfully crafted, with slow builds and minimal, Hearts of Space ambient passages, and by the way, hail satan for a competent vocal. The track ends on a slow fade of ambiguous white noise and water dripping on cobblestones. Other bands on this split, take note: this is how a raindrop-laden dungeon synth ending is done.
Envy - The Fallen Crimson (Temporary Residence Ltd.)
Not many folks do “screamo” in a way that appeals to me at all, but Envy is just so extremely good at it that it’s hard to deny. Of course, it helps that there are also tracks here that sound not unlike Enya (really), and others that sound closer to Sofy Major or UXO than anything in the screamo world. Towards the center of the album there’s a cache of quieter songs, one in a major key, with harmonies; one with a vibrato-less woman’s voice, like a plainchant, or something from Cocteau Twins. After all of the gentleness, "Fingerprint Mark" feels especially ripping. By track nine though, it starts to feel like they’ve done their tricks (like jarringly quiet, spoken interludes, for example) too many times for them to hold meaning or interest anymore. There’s something that happens when heavy music “peaks” so often and so monochromatically that the effect is the opposite of the aim, and exhausting to listen to. A hundred emotional pinnacles back-to-back-to-back just feels like flat ground.
Trixie Mattel - Barbara (Producer Entertainment Group)
Possibly the world’s only autoharp-playing draq queen singer-songwriter (please do let me know if I’m wrong about that, though) is back with more of what we know her for. Well, at least for half of Barbara, which is split into a “surf rock” side and an “Americana” side. On the first half, Trixie attempts a tongue-in-cheek, bright-and-sunny, 60s California vibe, but while it’s overdubbed and overly polished, it’s actually not over-the-top enough to land where intended. It gets closest on “We Got the Look,” which should have been the opener. Trixie is a talented songwriter, and that’s best showcased when she lets her songs be simple and rough around the edges. Couched in slick elevator pop instrumentation, they end up sounding like they’re from a musical based on an emo-pop band’s B-side catalog, and it’s a relief to arrive at Side B. Honestly, thank god for Side B. “Gold,” and “I Don’t Have a Broken Heart” are both strong songs, allowed to shine here in a simple wooden frame. Covering a track by queer country pioneers Lavender Country was a brilliant move for her, and “Stranger” shines as one of the best of her career. On the whole, this album sounds like an identity crisis — this might have worked better if the songs were interspersed and framed by the folkier numbers, rather than separated in this jarring way; maybe she’ll get the surfy sound together. All in all, this feels like a proper third album with a snippet of a weird debut tacked on the front.