The Ocean is an experimental metal band from Berlin formed in 2000. Primary songwriter and guitarist Robin Staps has a constant presence in the group which often operates as a collective with an evolving group of contributors and regular musicians. Its albums are often loose concept albums named after eras of the earth’s geologic history. Though the songs aren’t short on guitar driven heaviness but often employed to create dense and dynamic soundscapes. The most recent album, 2023’s Holocene, saw The Ocean more fully integrating synths and the aesthetics of electronic music into its ambitious compositions with songs that depict scenes from a dystopian near future and with lyrics that demonstrate the impact of the ideas behind The Situationist International and its prescient critique of consumer culture and the deleterious effect of late capitalism on human society and civilization.
Listen to our interview with Robin Staps on Bandcamp and follow The Ocean at the links below.
The Milk Blossoms will release its third album Open Portal on October 4, 2024 on vinyl, streaming and digital download. Open Portal is the first album to feature the band’s new lineup including Harmony Rose (vocals, ukulele, lyrics), William Overton (keys, synth), David Samuelson (electric bass) and Tyler Lindgren (drums). For the recording Zac Greenberg plays upright bass with Lindgren producing, recording, mixing and mastering the songs. Ahead of the record drop the group just released its second single “Teenager.”
The Milk Blossoms, photo courtesy the artists
“Teenager” begins with delicate textures and rhythms with ukulele and minimal percussion while Rose doesn’t reminisce so much as offers observations and thought provoking confessions with her words. The song accelerates in pace and ukulele seems to distort apace with the increasing urgency of the vocals toward the end of the song. All without losing what might be described as a vital vulnerability. Rose’s paces aren’t the standard meter of lyrics in a pop song. They seem more free verse and more intuitive in expressing the feeling and mood of the song even as she repeats the line “living like a teenager in the summer” at the end of the song after uttering the line once in the beginning. It hits like a mantra of intent, a reminder to oneself that just because you’ve gotten used to living on someone else’s schedule and according to the demands of living in the “adult” world doesn’t mean you can’t tap into what it felt like, even if naively and with the ignorance of a lack of life experience, to see the future as a place to make your fun and to dream of what to do and then do it and not be burdened by supposed practical considerations. Further if you could act without thinking overmuch about making a minor mistake or anchored by arbitrary social rules. Living like a teenager in the summer often meant for many people an open invitation to adventures and making your own fun without it having take a certain shape or be a certain way or ritualized. The lines “Glamor chandelier I’ve got a mind to escape to/what do you know about an open portal?” suggest that imagination and creativity is free to everyone who wants to escape mundane existence if they’re willing to act on it.
Growing into adulthood seems to be largely about increasing limitations that are largely arbitrary. This song appears to be an invitation, a challenge, to living outside those bounds at least once in awhile to feel alive and vital. It’s a rebel song without being try hard and thus more effective for it. Listen to “Teenager” on YouTube and follow The Milk Blossoms at the links below. Catch the band live at MCA Denver on July 19, 2024 with Dogtags, at The Skylark Lounge on August 22 with Car Microwave and mlady and at the album release show for Open Portal at the Hi-Dive on October 5 with George Cessna and Wheelchair Sports Camp.
Nihiloceros sounds like an amalgam of sounds and ideas across decades on “Penguin Wings.” The vocal melodies are in moments reminiscent of Lincoln-period They Might Be Giants but the angular, aggressive yet upliftingly melodic guitar riffs with a touch of jangle are like the a fusion of Bob Mould’s post-Hüsker musical projects and the more imaginative end of 2010s emo. The lyrics seem to juxtapose the surreal with the poignant like the band used a cut-up technique to assemble the words to give it a blend of the personal and the fantastical. The song mentions “dark ice balloons” which is also the name of the group’s latest full length that dropped on May 3, 2024 and available on vinyl, digital download and streaming. Listen to “Penguin Wings” on Spotify and follow Nihiloceros at the links provided.
Eudscher’s enigmatically titled “RFU318” sounds like traveling down a long corridor accompanied by pulsing low end sounds and echoing voices and rattles draw out into fading infinity. The music video presents a series of triangles in black coming at you against a hazy off-white background like markers on that corridor to who knows where. In moments it brings to mind the vibe of those “The Backrooms” videos of liminal spaces parallel to our own regular dimensional space or the mood of the chapters of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski where the characters find the hidden stairways that go on forever lit by a luminous gray light. It is a sustained drone, only small details change yet it is a little hypnotic ever evolving and holds your attention until the end. Watch the video for “RFU318” on YouTube and follow Eudscher at the links below. The album SN24002 released on April 5, 2024 and includes “RFU318.”
The Church formed in Sydney, Australia in 1980 as a post-punk band with psychedelic rock leanings that over the course of its long career has evolved in consistently fascinating directions. Its early records proved to be the sound of a band slightly ahead of its time and embodying the sound of what came to be known as dream pop with moody guitar and synth and literary lyrics that told stories and commented on human experiences in a way that wasn’t standard faire for a rock band. The group had breakthrough international success with the release of its 1988 album Starfish and hit single “Under the Milky Way” which had an echo impact in 2001 when it featured prominently in the psychological thriller Donnie Darko. 26 albums and numerous other releases along the way The Church firmly established itself as a band with creative ambition and emotionally refined sensibilities paired with a powerful live performance that it maintains to this day. Its later albums are among the best of the band’s career including its two most recent, The Hypnogogue (2023) and Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars (2024), companion albums telling the story of a future in which humanity struggles to hold onto its identity and reinvent itself for survival in even more uncertain times. The Church is still very much a guitar rock band but one that hasn’t failed to pay keen attention to where music has gone or keep track of its own vision and direction as a creative collective.
Listen to our interview with guitarist Ian Haug on Bandcamp and follow The Church at the links below. The group is currently on tour in the US with The Afghan Whigs and Ed Harcourt including a stop at Denver’s Ogden Theatre on Tuesday, July 2, 2024.
Steven Lee Lawson is a singer-songwriter from Denver whose musical exploits date back to the late 90s and early 2000s when as a fledgling musician he was involved in a variety of styles of music including the experimental/krautrock of Zubabi before finding his lane at the edges of Denver’s indie rock scene in the mid-2000s with the more classic pop and Americana-inflected projects like Oblio Duo and its multiple incarnations with then songwriting partner Will Duncan (now of Pleasure Prince). Lawson’s poetic lyrics shed a light on his attempts to come to terms with life challenges and struggles with a society and culture seemingly stuck on boosting dull and crass commercialism and anti-human systems of politics and economy. Lawson also spent some time as a sideman in bands like Ross Etherton and the Chariots of Judah before dropping out of actively being involved in music for a handful of years and then getting back into the joy of creating music again in recent years. Obvious touchstones like Harry Nilsson, Townes Van Zandt, Sparklehorse and Neil Young can be heard in Lawson’s musical DNA but his songs have always seemed deeply personal and idiosyncratic including his new EP Help Is On the Way due out June 27, 2024 and available as a limited edition 7″ through Snappy Little Numbers.
Listen to our interview with Steven Lee Lawson on Bandcamp and follow the songwriter at the links below. There will also be an EP release show with Blacktop Musical at The Broadway Roxy in the downstairs speakeasy on June 27, 2024 at 7pm.
Danielle Whalebone’s “Ordinary Things” begins by providing texture and tactile sounds with what sounds like a metallic object being crafted and formed with the repeated sound of metal on metal and resonating drones. There is a chain-like rattle that sounds throughout like a mechanical mantra. Whalebone’s vocals, when they enter the song provides a human touch to what feel like inorganic objects interacting. She sings of being aware of an immense aspect of existence but now she seeks “peace in ordinary things.” The industrial sounds of the song have a post-apocalyptic menace that contrast with that message which is the point. In extraordinary times in the way they are now in all the ways they have been there is a solace to be found in ordinary things and situations. When one has spent much of one’s life in pursuit of the un-ordinary and the remarkable because of how mundane and uninspiring everyday life can be and making art to take one out of those circumstances only to find oneself in situations that set a different standard for what is the usual one can yearn for perceived comfort and stability of ordinary things. Whalebone’s discordant and gloriously noisy song expresses well that contrast and reconciliation of former conflict with instincts and impulses. Listen to “Ordinary Things” on Spotify and follow Whalebone at the links below. Her new album Whispers of Shadows released on May 17, 2024 on streaming, for digital download and as a limited edition vinyl LP.
Stephen Bluhm is a songwriter based out of Hudson, New York who released his latest album Out of the Nowhere. Into the Here on April 19, 2024. It is the second full-length from Bluhm and one whose sophisticated, orchestral arrangements lend the songs a cinematic and storybook quality with exquisite details and attentiveness to aspects of production and composition that reminiscent of a The Magnetic Fields or Belle & Sebastian record or the level of richness of aesthetics one associates with a Wes Anderson film. It sounds like something from another era with deeply personal and idiosyncratic yet instantly relatable lyrics. The songs are literate art pop gems with an autumnal flavor that hits as old timey in its sensibilities but not in the folk Americana tradition so much as more in the vein of Rodgers & Hammerstein on the chamber pop and indie folk scale.
Listen to our interview with Stephen Bluhm on Bandcamp and follow the songwriter at the links below. Out of the Nowhere. Into the Here is now available for streaming, digital download and on vinyl.
“Meditation” is a very different kind of song for Australian post-punk band Dick Dudley. Its lyrics are a kind of guided meditation but one that goes beyond the tranquil self-care of a New Age or non-Western spirituality type of exercise. There is an undercurrent of intensity that suits the slinking sense of menace in the music. The latter sounds like the kind of surf rock you’d hear in Apocalypse Now. If Charlie surfed, that is. Dick Dudley hasn’t been short on irony and subversive humor but this song seems to be playing the messaging fairly straightforward while subverting the form of the guided meditation which can benefit anyone needing to focus on living in this current moment rather than being distracted by the forces that take us out of living in the moment. Listen to “Meditation” on Spotify and follow Dick Dudley on Instagram.
The angular breakdowns and resolves from direct guitar lines into splayed percussion that KYCTO uses throughout “War” reflects well the horrific subject of the song. The drama, chaos and violence punctuated by periods of deceptive silence finds itself embodied elegantly in the song which introduces some melodic then blaring saxophone that joins the rest of the instrumentation to create an entrancing cacophony with a paradoxically non-linear precision. The song is at the intersection of progressive black metal and noise rock. Like this band listened to a lot of Last Exit and later period Daughters and in moments its reminiscent of the less hyperkinetic and industrial moments of Killl. Listgen to “War” on Spotify and follow KYCTO on Instagram. The project’s album A concert for guitar, voice and drums released May 3, 2024.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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