Laura Carbone, photo by Thomas Von Der Heiden for Rockpalast in 2019
One imagines Laura Carbone doing slow turns in a desert landscape at sunset listening to “Horses.” Her more crisp vocals give way to ethereal, wordless singing like she’s matching the wind and contemplating the personal fortitude one must muster to stand up for oneself and envisioning how wild horses running free seem unconcerned with the unconcerned with arbitrary and internalized limits to their freedom. The melodies are pastoral and textural, unfurling slow and at their seeming leisure and yet they pull you into Carbone’s creative vision and ability to turn melancholic feelings into something more vivifying. Listen to “Horses” on Spotify and connect with Laura Carbone at the links provided. “Horses” will also be found on her forthcoming album The Cycle.
Composer Christopher Tignor has made a name for himself as an electro-acoustic violinist who as a live performer has fused the aesthetics and live performance style of acoustic instruments with computerized processing and use of pedals. His 2023 album The Art of Surrender showcases the broad spectrum of his experiments in minimalism and the subtleties of musicianship and expression available once you open up the possibilities of modifying tone in real time and pairing it with unconventional rhythms and song structure. The single “Off-Centered Hearts” has the soaring melodies one might expect but Tignor angles the long themes of the song to come together in elegant dramatic convergences with the mood of the song augmented and anchored by electronic low end and steady, finely syncopated percussion. When the violin glides seemingly along in a space of cosmic background drones near mid-song it’s a passage of sublime contemplation that segues into a short moment of atonality and directly into lightly plucked and processed violin tones and reminds one of the creative potential of an instrument most of us think we have heard taken to its sonic limits already. Listen to “Off-Centered Hearts” on YouTube and follow Tignor at the links below.
The latest Bestial Mouths album R.O.T.T. (inmyskin) came out on August 11, 2023 via Negative Gain on digital and vinyl and, produced and mixed by Rhys Fulber of Front Line Assembly fame, it sounds like a new chapter for Lynette Cerezo’s songwriting. This is perhaps dramatically highlighted by the track that closes the album, “Road of Thousand Tears.” It mourns the losses of the world and of personal losses and trying to get back some of what you didn’t know you lost along the way as you make your way through the often rocky and challenging path of life. The song swims in expansive, ethereal synth melody and its processional pace is marked by electronic beats that splay in a crumbling distortion while maintaining a hypnotic cadence. In the music video Cerezo seems to be hanging out in the ruins of an old industrial town in the American West, all dry scrub and desert landscapes and the remains of buildings and railroads and of the skeletons of a once great world power. It’s like a post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel come to life and yet there’s a yearning in the mood of the song a hope for being able to reclaim what remains and make something of it whether that’s your life, your culture and/or your community, the seeds of that hope reside in the song and its slowly expansive dynamic and what initially sounds like a work of deep melancholy becomes more like the saying a goodbye to a difficult chapter of existence and working toward what must come next but not before mourning what will never be again. The song and the album has features of the darkwave and post-punk sounds of previous Bestial Mouths releases but also a way of songwriting that feels markedly different and new. Watch the video for “Road of Thousand Tears” on YouTube and follow Bestial Mouths at the links provided.
When Freedom Fry takes us into “YOLO” it feels like we’re going on a flight with the duo somewhere. That ascending non-musical tone just has that vibe like you’re about to step onto a fast moving airplane to adventure. And the tropical percussion accents and retro synth pop melodies mixed with what might be described as summery melancholic pop. The title suggests a foolhardy sentiment of gusto but the lyrics tilt that spirit in a positive and self-affirming direction by pointing out how there is only living and the alternative and that mistakes and fear of them are unnecessarily stumbling blocks that you can get past with ease as long as you keep your focus on living the kind of life you want excepting perhaps if that means dire consequences for others but most of us don’t have to tangle with such potential quandaries and adhere to arbitrary social bounds implanted by us in our own minds to prevent us from living life as fully as we can in the moment. Listen to “YOLO” on Spotify and follow Freedom Fry at the links provided.
Vases has experimented with style and production on every single and “The Softest Sigh” demonstrates Ty Baron’s command of lush and clear melodies with strong rhythmic lines layered together. The sparkling guitar riff is at times reminiscent of New Order’s “Age of Consent” but the song swings into deeply introspective passages that take the certainty and direct energy of that aspect of the song and transitions it into ethereal, introspective passages in the choruses. It seems to embody the subjects of the song that seem to be able the uncertainty that pervades most of human existence and so many relationships in this moment that Baron attributes to “symptoms of modern life” and when he sings that line it rings incredibly true. Rarely has existential angst and frustration sounded so gorgeously hopeful if melancholic. The summation at the end of the song “I tried to be the perfect me, I guess I’ll be alright” is a poignant statement of how many of us are expected to meet some arbitrary standard that we may never attain but settle for being satisfied with giving it an effort even if it’s not quite enough and is it worth giving your all for everything the way you’ve been told your whole life if you’re an American? Not really. And Baron expresses in this song in his way how managing your expectations and preserving your sanity is often the best that can realistically be expected of anyone. Listen to “The Softest Sigh” on Spotify and follow Vases on Instagram.
Prepare for a journey into a world of synthetic birds in an alien landscape featuring noises of mysterious sources on Osopho’s environmental composition “Winged.” Luminous arpeggios, scritchy noise glitches, electronic titters and trills as those birds sound off into the perpetual not-day-not-night of a shadowy forest. Ghostly tonal percussion and chromatic, ethereal winds flow and all the while there is a soothing quality to the entire piece that sets your mind at ease and in acceptance of the enigmatic sounds and an uncertain environment like a place in a far future where you might explore or wander in such a space with no threat to your well-being with an awareness of that new reality and a deep sense of calm one might experience. It is the direct opposite of the world we live in now and though clearly a creative work and artificial it shines a light on the possibilities of a time and place where there is no need for all experiences and relationships to be transactional in some capacity and where there are places and situations where it is enough to merely experience a sense of wonder and appreciation of something that doesn’t exist in a commercial context. Listen to “Winged” on Spotify.
Slutavverkning bring a blunt menace and aggression tempered by an elegant artfulness to the songs from its new album Levande Charader. Perhaps most exemplary of the harrowing and mind-altering listening journey you’ll undertake can be experienced in the music video by Richard Lukacs for the song “Grisar,” which is Swedish for “Pigs.” We see various sorts of pigs looking like they’re the subjects of a menacing horror movie even when nothing explicitly horrific happens during the course of the video. The guitar riff is cutting and clipped like something you might hear off a Shellac album that compliments perfectly the distorted, shouting vocals. But underneath is a haunted drone and toward the end of the song is a maddened free jazz saxophone section that heightens the sense of urgency and disgust that runs through the song. But that disgust isn’t the predictable, judgmental sort one might expect from some sort of nihilistic, misanthropic noise rock band that many of us know and love. No, the lyrics delivered in savage chunks in Swedish are about how there are many pigs around us including ourselves and the ways in which we can be encouraged to abuse each other and declare others an undesirable but in the end we’re all animals who are equal on a ground level no matter how many airs we might choose to put on in a pantomime of some elevated existential status. The song is so stark it really does suit the subject matter and fans of This Heat and modern noise rock/post-punk bands like Meat Wave and Sex Swing will appreciate Slutavverkning’s wild energy and uncompromising intensity. Watch the surreal and colorful video for “Grisar” on YouTube. Levande Charader is now available on digital and vinyl.
The music video for Teenage Halloween’s combined singles “Supertrans/Takeaway” directed by Jordan Serrano shows vocalist Luk Henderiks living out the the frustrations and reconciliations in the songs themselves that seem to be perfect companions in expressing the struggles many people go through in life whether its the social pressure of gender conformity or generational trauma or genetic health issues making living itself complicated. But the exuberance of the songs in that triumphant yet self-aware and vulnerable modern pop punk and emo style with Henderik’s impassioned and commanding vocals makes these songs irresistible anthems of resistance and personal dignity that ring true whatever your struggles and challenges might be because we’ve all got them and Teenage Halloween is definitely tapped into a collective zeitgeist of this moment. Watch the video for “Supertrans/Takeaway” on YouTube and follow the group from Asbury Park, New Jersey at the links below. Its new album Till You Return drops October 20, 2023 on digital and vinyl via Don Giovanni Records. And catch Teenage Halloween on tour October through December in support of the new record. Dates on the Bandcamp page.
Chris Portka’s “your music is trash” sounds like something Ween and the Flaming Lips secretly did together in the early 90s before a larger public got hip to their deal. It’s a gloriously noisy, brashly lo-fi psychedelic anti-rock, splintered and deconstructed melody with vocals that are blown out with much of the rest of the sounds beyond explicable recognition other than keeping a strange consistency and a tripped out sweetness in the song. Had this been the 2000s you’d assume this was a new band on the Siltbreeze label or a cousin band to Times New Viking. That vibe that isn’t for everyone but true connoisseurs of untamed and rebellious weird music. And Portka released an entire album of this sort of thing with various incarnations and sounds like a dissected and reassembled No Age with a cool bit of freak folk dropped in called what else but Trash Music which released on August 1, 2023 and available now on streaming, digital download and very limited edition vinyl. Listen to “your music is trash” on Spotify and connect with Portka at the links below.
Anton Barbeau is one of those musicians still very active and prolific whose roots stretch back to American and international underground music with great creative distinction if not household fame. He has worked with the great neo-psychedelic band The Bevis Frond, he has collaborated with the late, great Scott Miller of The Loud Family and Game Theory fame, and for the new album his guest performers include Colin Moulding (XTC), Andy Metcalfe (Soft Boys/Robyn Hitchcock’s The Egyptians) and Chris Stamey (dB’s). That new album being Morganmusik/Nachtschlager which released on September 22, 2023. The lead single “Waiting On The Radio” features Barbeau on a trip on a bus across the country bemoaning the tire on the bus being busted yet taking solace in the promise of hearing “something golden” on the radio. In the story we get updates about how the driver should have retired years ago but in this America needed the money to get by and how everyone on the bus including himself is losing patience. But Barbeau and the band take us into gloriously beautiful psychedelic passages of expansive melody. It’s the kind of power pop song that made the first wave of “college rock” in the 80s so rewarding with tight yet imaginative songcraft that could resonate with frustrations of everyday life yet provide the kind of emotional release that was both soothing and captivating. Yet the song doesn’t feel like a throwback. Rather, it highlights how everyone has static in their lives that they have to get through and it needn’t feel like some end of the world inconvenience. It’s a very sane song in less than sanguine times. Watch the video for “Waiting On The Radio” on YouTube and follow Anton Barbeau at the links below.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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