The “Queen of Lo-Fi” Azalia Snail returns with her fifteenth album titled POWERLOVER (released April 5 via Cloud Recordings). The featured single from the album “Zap You of That Hate” includes contributions from Alan Sparhawk of Low and an entrancing music video that looks like something that one might more expect to see from an old website from the 90s except with much better image quality. Maybe it’s Omnichord melodies forward, minimal percussion and an evolving backdrop of drones and other synths that reset your mind from the present and into the more colorful and analog aesthetic of the music video with images of nature enhanced by collage art animation and flashing lights. Like the song and the visuals together are aiming to hypnotize you into a better and more benevolent state of mind with the artist speaking the title of the song in the end to punctuate what has been a wonderful sonic journey beyond the highly produced music of the modern era by demonstrating how something that embodies being accepted on its own terms can be a way of life that can grow as much as systematized conformity. Watch the video for “Zap You of That Hate” on YouTube and follow the pioneering lo-fi, experimental pop artist Azalia Snail at the links provided.
Mimi Pretend taps into a similar emotional realm of melancholic nostalgia and hazy melodies as Chromatics and Julee Cruise on “Smith Lake.” The atmospheric low end of the bass grounds what is otherwise a fairly ethereal song but so do the lyrics that seem to be about someone who is a lost soul in the world who feels unloved by his mother being consoled by someone who does love him. Fluttering, softly distorted guitar haunts the edges of the song alongside sparkling tones that conjure images of late night conversations interrupted by shooting stars and distant sounds of the road. The imagery of the song probably represents the kind of people many of us know who bother to pay attention to what’s going on with people beyond the obvious but which isn’t too well hidden of emotional trauma and acting out trying to find love and acceptance somewhere not really knowing how and not trusting it when it presents itself in your life. All because of the rejections and low key, or not so subtle, gaslighting and emotional abuse most of us have received at some point along the way because how many people really come from a completely healthy family dynamic? Some people seem to take it harder than others and/or the hurt is deeper and more consistent. This song is a gentle touch in counterpoint to those ways of being and relating to others. It’s a loving tribute to a loved one cast in pastoral dream pop that lingers with you throughout the song and long after. Listen to “Smith Lake” on Spotify and follow Mimi Pretend at the links below. The project’s new EP Colorado 1996 released on January 5, 2024. For fans of the aforementioned as well as Mazzy Star and Low.
Bees in a Bottle released its latest album The Sun Left and Took The Moon With It on April 14, 2023 with linking themes of stories, according to the Bandcamp preview, “written from the perspective of various women who’ve lost a loved male rock icon to suicide or drug addiction. These are the inner conversations of wives and mothers struggling their way through grif asking for meaning, hope, and ultimately, a way back to themselves.” The lead track “Wet Widow” is not just a great introduction to an emotionally and creatively ambitious album, it embodies the vulnerability, the pain and the resilience of the aim of the music. The song begins with a hushed grace with vocals like a burning ember that’s been suppressed for uncounted time allowed to flare forth in bursts of feeling and earnest expressions of newfound strength and independence. Musically one might think of the shimmery elegance of the best end of Eleventh Dream Day’s scrappy slowcore styling or of Throwing Muses’ poetic and pointed songs dipping into personal myth and homegrown folkloric narratives. Fans of Low will appreciate the elegant compositions and expansive spirit tied to unvarnished emotional fortitude found unexpectedly in our most fragile moments. You won’t hear lines so real and raw as “Put a gun to my head if you really want to see inside, it’s the only way you’ll get your piece of mind/Because I won’t be your tragedy porn little widow all wet with tears” in a song by artists not willing to go off into the thrilling and psychologically perilous deep end in search of personal truth. Listen to “Wet Widow” on Spotify and follow Bees in a Bottle at the links provided.
Giant Waste of Man is plugged into the existential despair of the world today and in 2021 and 2022 spinning that into thoughtful and gentle songs about sorting through the deluge of feelings and panning for nuggets of truth in the floodstream of experiences and information that are definitely trending bleak and perilous. In the video for “Summer, after” we see a landscape in near sepia tones that depict perhaps the Los Angeles skyline in the background and immediately taking you back, if you remember the imagery or if you were there, when the Bay Area looked like Blade Runner 2049. The lonely piano figure, the ominous drones, the delicate brush of acoustic guitar riffs and hushed vocals in warm harmony make this song seemingly about all the desperate and dramatic gestures, all the bravado, all the surefire plans of rescue and renewal, the talk of returning to normal is just the conditioning of culture flexing in your heart all while you know it amounts to zero and that we are living in a time when bolder and quicker action are called for not fueled by the corrosive ideas and ideologies that have guided civilization for hundreds of years down a path of destruction and fascism. But we were never prepared for this, we were told all kinds of lies about how things are, how obeying this rule and that rule and working hard and all that nonsense about meritocracy and institutions and the rule of law preserving a just way of life—the way it has played out has hollowed out our lives and our civilization while we do pretty much nothing in the face of authoritarian rule barreling down in reaction to a weak “moderate” government serving almost entirely narrow moneyed interests and warping all collective effort in service to a profit that won’t matter if billions die in climate/ecological disaster or nuclear war. This song humanizes this backdrop of the thinking of anyone with a real awareness of what’s going on in the world and has any sense of things. When you hear the lyrics at the end of the song “Never was a man OK with a lie/When the truth was right in front of me” it just makes it simple to dispense with the chaff compromised public discourse and take life and the world on its own terms which may be one of the only paths through the rough times ahead. Musically it might be reminiscent for some of Broken Social Scene minus the dense electronic component but tonally of Low in the twenty-first century with its combination of vulnerability and emotional truth. Watch the video of “Summer, after” on YouTube and connect with Giant Waste of Man at the links below. The group’s new LP Biographer is due out August 26 on Chain Letter Collective.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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