With Arrangements, the fourth studio album by Preoccupations, the Calgary band achieves a perfect synthesis of its self-described "labyrinthine post-punk" approach: atypical rhythms; modular structures; chilly, subterranean textures; Mike Wallace's dynamic, punctuating drumming; the same-brain interplay of guitars, keys, synths, and effects between Scott Munro and Daniel Christiansen; Matt Flegel's raspy, oft-resigned snarl; and a penchant for melody that is simultaneously confrontational and captivating, lead by Flegel's expressive, bass-as-lead-instrument playing style borrowed directly from Peter Hook of Joy Division.

Joy Division is a large-share influence on Preoccupations, and its echo reverberates throughout the seven tracks on Arrangements. You can also hear traces of Wire, Sonic Youth, Bauhaus, and even early Police, whose influence is most evident on the album's second track, Ricochet. The bleak, grey-sky sonic DNA of Women, the band Wallace and Flegel played in before forming Preoccupations — then known as Viet Cong — is also unmistakably present.

Preoccupations persist in an attitude of resistance, and a heavy, sometimes constant strain of ennui runs through Arrangements. Asked to characterize the album's principal themes, Matt Flegel summarized, "It's basically about the world blowing up and no one giving a shit." A head-shaking ambivalence is palpable. Still, for all its bad-mood bravado, there is a vibrancy and a sense of purpose to these songs that, try as the band might, cannot be suppressed. Arrangements offers both a defining statement on — and an effectual antidote for — these downturned times.

December 2022

On their first album for Sargent House, the Detroit-based collective delivers 12 dizzying, melody-rich math-metal songs that annihilate all templates. The move from the haunting dream pop on the album's opening title track (a candidate for song of the year) to its Swans-ian finale, The Music Becomes a Skull (featuring the late Mark Lanegan), is truly exhilarating. Few can match the band's kinetic energy when its numerous elements perform with breakneck momentum, as on tracks like All Futures, An Iteration, and Faith In Medication. There is so much happening on ULTRAPOP, and the stylistic surprises come so frantically that repeated listens are not only mandatory but awesomely rewarding.

December 2021

During its all-too-brief 3+ years, Calgary art-rock group Women created two of the best post-punk albums I have ever heard: the self-titled Women (2008) and Public Strain (2010). Beautifully bleak, unsettled, and idiosyncratic, Women's sound is a captivating, often subdued synthesis of dissonant noise, atmosphere, and asymmetrical melody. At its most affecting, it nods to the hooky sensibilities of 1960s pop, masterfully reimagined and distorted through their chilly grey-sky filter: “...the sound of vintage psychedelia bleached of its color.” (Pitchfork)

The songs on Rarities 2007-2010 are some of their best, and they hint at what Women might have done next had the band not fallen apart so quickly. The highlight of the EP is Bullfight, a song originally released on the Women / Cold Pumas / Fair Ohs / Friendo split 7-inch (Faux Discx, 2011). Here, the bright, punctuating guitar notes interwoven by Patrick Flegel and the late Christopher Reimer (1986-2012) superbly complement the jaunty, rhythmic undercurrent created by Matt Flegel (bass) and Mike Wallace (drums). It's the perfect soundscape for Patrick's haunted, often inflectionless vocals, which – tuned with the guitars – achieve a uniquely melodic quality. Bullfight resonates with an affecting beauty that dares to suggest something close to optimism as it fades out. Contrasted with the desolate, subterranean palette of much of the band's other material, it represents an uplifting and unforgettable coda.

Extra: Hear Benelux, an unreleased home recording by Christopher Reimer.

November 2020

Indian Summer was a punk/hardcore band from Oakland, California, constituted of brothers Adam Nanaa (guitar, vocals) and Seth Nanaa (bass, vocals), Eyad Kaileh (drums), and Marc Bianchi (guitar). The quartet was active for only one year, between 1993 and 1994; a brief existence, indeed, but long enough for the band to create some of the most original and influential music of its time to come out of the DIY community.

Independent archivists Numero Group were hip to this, and in 2019, they released Giving Birth To Thunder, an LP version of the band's ten-song discography. The collection introduces listeners anew to the band's impassioned slow-burn sound, one cultivated in the early-90s Bay Area DIY scene but also uniquely jazz-oriented. (Seth went on to play in a free-jazz outfit influenced by John Coltrane's improvisational 1966 record Meditations.)

I was lucky to pick up a copy of the band's self-titled 7", of which only a few hundred copies were pressed, at a show in 1994. The music on that piece of vinyl was unforgettable from the first spin. Not only was it the first time I heard Bessie Smith — whose brokenhearted pleadings, sampled from an old, crackling recording, aptly prefix the record's first and third songs, “Aren't You, Angel?” and “Angry Son” (titled “Woolworm” on Giving Birth To Thunder) — it also forever broadened the scope of what music could express and changed my perception of what punk and hardcore music could sound like.

Attempting to characterize the music he made with Indian Summer for episode 101 of the Washed Up Emo podcast, Seth Nanaa remarked, "We didn't sound like anybody." A quarter-century later, and after countless attempts by lesser indie bands to emulate their formula, Giving Birth To Thunder proves they still don't.

December 2019

Tangerine Reef is an audiovisual album by Animal Collective in collaboration with Coral Morphologic, an art-science duo and self-professed “pioneers of avant-garde coral macro-videography.” The project commemorates the 2018 International Year of the Reef. On this offering, Animal Collective (here consisting of Avey Tare, Deakin, and Geologist — Panda Bear did not contribute) create languid, organic sound assemblages that evoke their past works Meeting of the Waters (2017), Transverse Temporal Gyrus EP (2012), and ODDSAC (2010). I also hear a direct ancestral tie to Avey Tare's 2017 solo album Eucalyptus, one of my favorite albums in the Animal Collective family tree.

These compositions provide the ideal audio accompaniment to a visual project of oceanic themes because they themselves resemble water. Tracks flow in and out of one another. Errant sounds surface and then quickly fall away. Avey’s voice often sounds submerged, as if seeking you out from some murky depth. Like many AC efforts of the last decade, Tangerine Reef is heavy on electronics, synths, and vocal treatments, but even those sound aquatic here.

Having listened intently to Animal Collective’s kaleidoscopic, genre-defying output for nearly 20 years, I don't believe they could ever create something other than a genuine expression. Theirs is an original sound, unapologetically distinct, and Tangerine Reef is another compelling example of the band’s unique fingerprint. Simultaneously haunting, ethereal, urgent, and beautiful, it’s as strange and endearing a record as any Animal Collective has made to date, and it’s my favorite album of the year.

December 2018

Before she released Laughter, Seattle-based musician Jesy Fortino, a.k.a. Tiny Vipers, was best known for two LPs on Sub Pop: Life on Earth (2009) and Hands Across the Void (2007). Laughter is the first Tiny Vipers release since Life on Earth, and with eight years between them, the two works share little stylistic or sonic commonality. Where Life on Earth and Hands Across the Void offer quiet, serene acoustic guitar and hushed vocals, Laughter is an organic construction of moody soundscapes and ambient keyboard sketches. There is no acoustic guitar and few vocals. It's entirely woven of a different fabric.

The word “laughter” evokes thoughts of carefree joviality, so it's somewhat amusing that an album by that title would contain no such sentiments — rather their opposites. The mood of Laughter often feels unsettled, gloomy, and ponderous. All affability is absent. The album opener “Boarding Charon's Boat” begins with haunting vocals floating nervously, as if trying to escape, above a pulsing, shifting electronic landscape that scrambles, agitated, into something akin to mania at its climax. Then, the sudden segue into the disarming calm of “Crossing The River Of Yourself” — a track of such resonant beauty that it often echoes unprompted in my head. Laughter's third track, “Living on a Curve”, has wayward anxiety reminiscent of the most esoteric, lyricless tracks from Bowie's Berlin trilogy. It could probably sequence on the autistic second side of Low inconspicuously. Elsewhere, the scare-synth on “K.I.S.S.” and the album's title track evoke portentous unease suitable for a horror score, like a John Carpenter theme re-imagined.

Fortino's Sub Pop output garnered a devoted, if largely independent, following and critical acclaim. I could see where fans of those albums — who aren't aware of her foray into brooding ambiance with Mirroring, a collaboration with Grouper's Liz Harris — might be surprised by Laughter's stylistic about-face. But there is no cause for disappointment here. With Laughter, Fortino has created something wholly original — a kind of field recording from the unknown — that speaks to a creative vision more exciting and vast in scope than the more traditional singer/songwriter fare of her earlier work. Once you hear it, it doesn't let go.

December 2017

Sumac is Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists) on drums, Brian Cook (Russian Circles, ex-Botch) on bass, and Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom, ex-Isis) on guitar and vocals; three musicians with impressive resumes and whose distinct playing styles complement one another perfectly. Sumac may have begun as Turner's singular vision, but the two albums to date, The Deal (2015) and What One Becomes, proclaim a brilliant command of atmosphere, mood, and negative space that suggests it could only have emerged from the sonic collision of these three specific players. Each contributes something irreplaceable to the band's dynamism.

Like its predecessor, What One Becomes is an exhilarating, no-nonsense collision of opposing forces: darkness and light, catastrophe and grace. It's rare to find a metal album that is fraught and introspective, but What One Becomes is what it sounds like. There is a gravity to this record that is often so forceful escape seems impossible. Its heavy, deliberate pace consumes the listener completely. The result is more an experience — tension and release made audible — than a mere collection of songs, and, for me, its unique and prodigious impact was unequaled by any other album in 2016.

December 2016

Benoit Pioulard is nothing if not prolific, so it can be challenging to keep up with the music he releases. I had heard no mention of Noyaux until it appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Its sudden existence was one of those rare and thrilling surprises sadly infrequent in a digital, news-breaking culture that does its best to make surprises obsolete.

Noyaux's visceral impact on me was profound. Its ethereal, electronic soundscapes are unbelievably moving and revelatory yet nearly impossible to describe. They could be the sound of the universe expanding, the sound of loss, or the sound of the unconscious slowly, deliberately unfolding itself.

However one interprets Noyaux, it's a work of pure sonic and cinematic transport, a powerful and hauntingly beautiful experience that evokes rarely felt or experienced emotions. That is the essence of all art, of course, and with Noyaux, Pioulard achieves it with just four tracks, twenty-five minutes, and no words.

December 2015

White Fence is one of several active projects by Tim Presley, a California-based musician who played previously in the hardcore punk band The Nerve Agents and the psychedelic-leaning Darker My Love. He also joined The Fall for a spell, playing on the band's 2007 LP Reformation Post TLC and guesting on some of the band's later albums. Working as White Fence, Presley has been incredibly prolific, releasing six studio albums by the time of this writing (seven if you include his collaboration with Ty Segall, Hair).

The White Fence sound might be typecast as lo-fi, psychedelic, folk-rock, and/or garage-rock. A roll call of its influences might include, but certainly not be limited to, Syd Barrett's solo work, The Monkees, The Byrds, Count Five, The Electric Prunes, and Gram Parsons. I hear reminders, too, of many not-so-distant acts, such as Gogogo Airheart. Though White Fence might recall these and similar acts, the project's expansive output to date is anything but derivative. Presley takes his myriad influences and fuses them with his incredible songwriting ability and distinct sense of melody to create something unique and unharnessed to any sound or genre. White Fence is undeniably his.

For The Recently Found Innocent builds off the momentum of the wonderfully raucous full-band sound caught on White Fence Live in San Francisco (2013), and that was hinted at with Hair and last year's Cyclops Reap. Segall mixed For The Recently Found Innocent, and his exterior input complements these songs nicely and gives them added presence. It still sounds like music made by a man alone in a room, but the room is larger and filled with new things to play with. The result is the most complete rendering of Tim Presley's wonderfully kaleidoscopic psych-pop sensibilities, and it's probably his most fully-dressed album to date. In 2014, there was nothing like it.

December 2014

Sometime in the Spring of 2013, an image appeared on the Instagram feed of independent record label Deathwish. It was beautifully sparse, with only a single word — SUNBATHER — spelled across three rows of text in elegant, minimal type against a soft gradient orange-pink background. The stems, crossbars, and shoulders of its letterforms seemed to disappear into the warm tones behind them. The caption revealed it to be the cover art (designed by Nick Steinhardt of Touché Amoré) of the forthcoming album by the band Deafheaven from San Francisco. Deafheaven had somehow eluded me, but they now had my attention.

Deathwish released Sunbather on June 11, and I listened to it for the first time that morning (somehow, I summoned the willpower to avoid all prior leaks). I was immediately consumed by the opening track “Dream House” with its cascading wash of guitars, frantic drums, and the tense, controlled screams of vocalist George Clarke, sonic characteristics that define so much of Sunbather.

Across the album's 7-track landscape, epic, genre-crossing crescendos of frantic, moody aggression paced by impenetrable blast beats suddenly give way to swells of disarmingly pretty guitar interludes. It's ferocious and beautiful in turns. The result achieves widescreen emotional resonance — equal parts devastating, haunting, and lovely — and a visceral impact that is immediate and relentless.

December 2013