Just in time for the cold to begin setting in with some bite and force is Nighdrator’s single “Frigid.” It’s sets a steady pace with the flooding distortion on the guitar wailing and floating like a bleak, icy, windswept landscape accented by the percussion and low end, the bass droning like mysterious and menacing rumblings in the distance. All while the vocals keep a sense of warmth and feeling in a song that seems to be about someone who is incapable of emotionally giving in a regular, human way even when you extend yourself to them whether that is the product of trauma or social conditioning the epic dynamics of the song embody an intensity of emotion when contrasting personality types come together. Fans of the more ethereal end of doom metal or the heavier end of shoegaze will appreciate the hybrid of styles Nighdrator brings to this song and its output thus far. Listen to “Frigid” on Spotify and connect with Nighdrator at the links provided.
“My Head” by Soft Punch sounds a little like an indie rock update of New Wave power pop and XTC. It has those attentions to detail and uplifting melody with lyrics about a seemingly never-ending struggle with a bevy of things to get through the day. And in the end the song goes off the rails into triumphant and gloriously chaotic noise to burn out the anxieties and frustrations outlined in the song. Singer and songwriter Rye Thomas is based in Washington, D.C. and he’s no stranger to overcoming seemingly impossible barriers to a normal life. In 2013 he acquired a mysterious, debilitating illness that left him home bound as someone who was already an active musician (touring in bands like Pash and Tereu Tereu) but for whom then many sounds triggered severe migraines. But he didn’t stop writing music even if that meant 30 minutes a day with just a minimal keyboard and a cassette recorder to capture his song ideas that when his health improved some he was able to hone into a fine body of work which can be heard on his album Above Water which released on Bad Friend Records on September 15, 2023. Watch the video for “My Head” directed by Jonathan Howard on YouTube and follow Soft Punch at the links below.
Bluphoria is a band now based in Nashville, Tennessee that originally formed in 2019 when lead singer and lead guitarist Reign LaFreniere moved to Eugene, Oregon to study film. LaFreniere grew up in the East Bay and South Bay in California loving horror shorts and went to an arts high school that allowed students to rent/borrow video equipment and production software. Raised in a musical family, LaFreniere didn’t really start playing music until high school in his sophomore year after getting a guitar. On a trip on the John Muir trail a friend only had Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and some Simon and Garfunkel songs on a player and being in a setting where music wasn’t as readily accessible for long stretches gave him a deeper appreciation of its importance listening to that music. When he returned from that hiking trip he got into Jimi Hendrix as someone who looked like him playing music of that caliber with Hendrix’s singing style an inspiration for LaFreniere’s fledgling attempts as a vocalist. But his focus was on film until he got to Eugene, Oregon when he met like-minded students like Dakota Landrum (rhythm guitarist, backing vocals) and Rex Wolf (bass).
At one of the band’s house shows an EDGEOUT Records intern was in attendance and signed the group to EDGEOUT/UME/UMG in January 2021 around the time when drummer Dani Janae joined the group. A year later Bluphoria drove to Tennessee to record their self-titled debut full length album which released on May 5, 2023. Even a casual listen to the songs and even the band’s 2020 debut EP Alone reveals a knack for entrancing melodic hooks in a power pop style mixed with touches of psychedelic rock and what might be described as soulful garage punk. With LaFreniere’s commanding vocals providing some of the grit and emotional resonance fans of The Replacements and The Plimsouls will find a lot to like about what Bluphoria has to offer.
Bison Bone recently released its new EP 40 Grit. As the name suggests the stories across the EP’s five tracks are tales of everyday endurance and honing the rough edges of life to where it more suits your existence in the moment and to get through more trying patches. Its warm melodies and Courtney Whitehead’s introspective yet direct vocal style engages thetpo listener and the elegantly orchestrated music pulls you into an intimate and vividly observed moments the highlight moments that aren’t the stuff of striving and grinding and performative positivity of a lot of pop and rock music. But they are the stuff of real life that anchor your memories and stay with you for a lifetime. Whitehead seems skilled in putting together his own experiences in contexts that can resonate with people who recognize the psychological and emotional truth in a well crafted narrative enmeshed in music. Bison Bone formed in the mid-2010s after Whitehead moved to Denver from Oklahoma via Texas and found a community in which he could share his songwriting and find collaborators who got his creative vision and style of working class stories that didn’t glorify the lifestyle so much as highlight the inherent dignity of experiences most of us have and which translate well to the style of music Bison Bone offers which is to say Americana and at times a touch of psychedelia and country but informed by the humanistic psychological insights and poetry of Bruce Springsteen and Uncle Tupelo.
Metro Riders’ “Aenigma” was inspired by Lucio Fulci’s 1988 horror film of the same name. And in the video we see a chain of gossip in a classroom at the boarding school where the film was set. Which fits track that has a clandestine feel, one might say it has a mood of late night contemplation and after dusk secret adventures. There is a slow oscillating melody over a pulsing low end drone and minimalist percussive tone holding an informal rhythm. But it maintains a deep sense of mystery and when the flourish of other keyboard sounds come in it feels like other secrets are unveiled even though we know nothing of the exact thoughts going into the track’s composition, it just imparts the emotional resonance of traveling further into an alluring mystery that might go tragically but not without a certain dark fascination with a tantalizing enigma. Watch the video for “Aenigma” on YouTube and follow Metro Riders at the links below. The new Metro Riders album Lost in Reality became available on September 29, 2023.
With the title “Androids” you may not be expecting the folk-inflected garage pop song Sonny & The Sunsets have given us from the Self Awareness Through Macrame album that released on September 1, 2023. The bright accents in the jangle give it a physicality that gives its circular riffing some real momentum and at times it’s reminiscent of some of New Order’s more garage-y moments like “The Village” or like later period Beat Happening. But Sonny Smith’s words about wanting to be able to honest and comfortable in his truth and genuine feelings with another person give context to “Androids” as a symbol for how we so often have to be politic in life and adopt a depersonalizing presentation to fit in with a technocratic view of humanity that seems in place in so much of public life. So this song is about a quiet resistance and rebellion for one’s humanity in the face of the pressure to conform and become a product to be tweaked like, yes, some android. The rest of the record has similar expressions of moments of focusing and thinking about presumed norms and things we take for granted without ever examining whether they’re really of value or whether its more dead weight conforming impulses and ritualized behavior. Listen to “Androids” on Spotify and follow Sonny & The Sunsets at the links below.
The sense of longing runs deep from the beginning of Sharing’s “Curtains.” Distorted synth accents and simple melody with contemplatively warm vocals at the forefront and guitar shimmer in the background in a slow burning procession into the distance. The lyrics seem to reflect on the feeling of energy between performer and audience and how there is something special and electric about it when things are going well. But toward the later part of the song it seems as though something deeper and more meaningful and majestic and powerful is introduced when the lyrics go to “I don’t want to see the curtains close/Not on you” with the last three words repeated to the outro in a haze of incandescent synth tone, swells of ethereal guitar and cascading rhythms as though in regretful farewell to a relationship or the impending death of a loved one. It hits heavy in a way that is beautifully heartbreaking especially to anyone who has lost anyone over an extended period and dealing with the final moments for which no one is every as prepared as they think they might be. Listen to “Curtains” on Spotify and connect with Logan, Utah’s Sharing at the links provided.
A Beacon School unfurls a swirling, kaleidoscopic melody to wash around the introspection expressed in “KITM” (which means keep it to myself). This finds entrancing form in the music video by Alex Beebe and Chase Wagner with illustrative colors, geometric shapes and spectral overlays and following some seemingly educational film footage about a variety of red flowers that grow on trees and bushes. But the colors are all otherworldly with the blues overwhelming the greens and the rose tones enhanced. We see an image of a boat coming into harbor in the night and hands placing tiles as colors switch and flash. It’s all very surreal yet oddly reassuring. The song is like if Animal Collective collaborated with Washed Out to make a tonally rich yet hushed shoegaze track. It teems with energy yet doesn’t overwhelm and because of that it invites an immediate re-listen. For a song that seems to urge you to stop procrastinating and take that next crucial step into a rewarding life it coaxes more than cajoles and that makes all the difference. The new A Beacon School album yoyo released on October 13, 2023. Watch the video for “KITM” on YouTube and follow A Beacon School at the links below.
Shelf Lives start “Off The Rails” with a repetition of the line, “No fuckin’ way man” as the song careens into a glitchy, driving song that captures the headiness of the hypnosis in being caught up in a cycle of consumerism. Succinctly, Shelf Lives with the touches of distortion on the lead vocals and the frantic pace of the song and its urgent electronic melodies incisively outlines how consumerism can tap into basic human psychology and induce compulsive behaviors and manipulate the mind’s reward and punishment system at a basic level that’s provided and marketed to us as little things that we can buy as a seeming shortcut to fulfillment when it just isn’t. The chorus of “Can’t go off the rails now ’cause you’re none in a million” encapsulates how consumerism both controls and depersonalizes in equal measure with the corrosive nature of its inherent appeal as a tool of capitalism in a social and economic system that reinforces compliance on a nearly instinctive level. Shelf Lives in creatively delineating the dynamic point to how we can deprogram ourselves in first breaking the cycle of manufactured desire. Listen to “Off The Rails” by electro post-punk band Shelf Lives on Spotify and follow the group at the links below.
&Tilly’s video for “In Circles” was shot entirely on iPhone but its color palette and textural detail looks like something that could be part of an A24 film set in parallel universe. We see a figure seeming to be floating on and in azure waters with visuals of luminous, aquatic invertebrates floating gracefully about and a shoreline of darkened trees. The music itself is elegant layers of processed piano, sublimely subtle guitar and ethereal percussive sounds and hushly melodious vocals. Perhaps even plucked violin to give it all an even more classical sensibility that lends the song a timeless aspect like something that could have come from a more pop 90s New Age alternative music realm for fans of Enya and Loreena McKennitt or newer artists like Cate Le Bon or Julia Holter. But &Tilly’s sound is also in the realm of dream pop but with more than usual mastery of sonic details masterfully orchestrated. Watch the video for “In Circles” on YouTube and follow &Tilly at the links provided.
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