Laura Wolf seems to have channeled her background in classical music into creating truly unique pop songs for her latest album, Shelf Life (out June 2, 2023 via Whatever’s Clever). A particularly striking and poignant example of this is the single “Homebody” and the stop motion collage video by Renata Zeiguer that seems like the perfect cognate of the way Wolf has assembled and orchestrated samples of sound, loops, processed noises, strings, guitar, electronic noises creating various textures and white noise as drone to create a sense of the private and the intimate one hears in Wolf’s vocals. It sounds and with the video looks like a group of snapshots of childhood projected into the adult mind and adult concerns but filtered through a childlike sense of play and aesthetic lens. It’s a song about being stuck and the self-imposed urgency to move on yet an impulse to enjoy the moment of not having to deal, for a while, with the demands of your everyday life and the song embodies that liminal moment in a delightful and captivating way. Watch the video for “Homebody” on YouTube and follow Laura Wolf at the links below.
HEAR ME OUT delves into a complex emotional space on “Meaning Less.” Its gentle guitar work, often like glimmerings of tone on the edge of the song, spare but strong percussion propels the song along as the vocals shift from introspective tones to a swell of emotion like you might when thinking back to the ways you’ve been treated and mistreated as suggested in the song where it sounds like someone who was used and abused for their body with their humanity discarded and the way that experience can stick with you even after you revisit it in your mind, even if you write a song or make a creative work with that energy behind it and informing its creation. But this song that seems equal parts post-punk and indiepop feels like a moving through those feelings to the other side of personal grief. Its blend of tenderness and intensity is reminiscent of the likes of Porridge Radio and leaves one feeling exultant in the moment rather than defeated. Listen to “Meaning Less” on Spotify and follow the German band HEAR ME OUT on Instagram.
Anna Rose brings to “Pray To The Trees” a sense of intimacy and mystery. Following the spare opening of minimal guitar accompaniment, Rose’s warm and clear vocals shine through a menacing soundscape of processional rhythms and roiling, ambient noise that borders on the industrial. Burbling, chaotic synth in the background at one point sounds like systems breaking down as the song transitions back to the vulnerable and unadorned passages of music with Rose’s vocals becoming more impassioned as she sings about not being someone’s savior and that that person is their own. This after showing her own vulnerabilities and words about being “broken in places I can’t talk about” and “pills I’ve taken to carry the load.” And having “questions worth asking when you’re on your knee, pray to your god, I’ll pray to the trees.” It’s a song that feels weighty and existential suggesting that we all have burdens and demons and limitations but we are perfectly capable of working through these issues while making our way in a troubled world and that you’re never completely on your own in feeling the pressure and looking for a source of strength outside of yourself in the most pressing of times. Listen to “Pray To The Trees” on Spotify or any of the services from the LinkTree below where you can listen to the rest of the Already Gone EP (released June 29, 2023) and follow Anna Rose at the links provided.
“Funny Things” by DeFi Rock Band is a song about the love of a city garbage man for an artificially intelligent cyborg girl. Which could be merely gimmicky but there’s something charming about how the song’s driving, grunge-y guitar riff with the steady percussion carries the intentionally gritty lead male vocals and the processed voice of the cyborg as they harmonize in the most unconventional way you’re likely to hear in a song for awhile. Little pulses of synth accent the song all the while and the melody is reminiscent of something out of early punk as influenced by 1960s girl groups. It shouldn’t work, or it should fall apart at some point but just like a near future of decayed civilization and a hodgepodge of technology and street level existence that is going to be there no matter what the tech bros in their pampered and fragile towers of privilege insist is the manifestation of their detached dreams of posthuman existence. Listen to “Funny Things” on Spotify and follow DeFi Rock Band from Barcelona, Spain at the links below.
On “your progress” Kelly Garlick and Agnar truly dive deep into exploring in tone and texture the journey into the psyche of a person processing trauma whether of the kinds everyone experiences and/or more specifically the kind one imagines or knows directly of the agony of gender dysphoria. The sample of a male-sounding voice saying “In order for me to progress I had to shed everything I was, I had to be put through psychological torture in order to be seen as an equal as human, now I don’t think I can regain that part of me every again, just gone and I just wish I had my life back” in the first half the song is so haunting and poignant, vulnerable and real that pretty much anyone that has had to conform to some bizarre, arbitrary social and cultural standard and has had to work through it can identify with that sentiment. All around, the sounds of machinery run in the background, processed metallic sounds, sharp drones like distorted electronic wind, an assembling ambient circle of tone, abstract chimes in the near distance, shuffling, percussive sounds traversing in stereo effect, the sounds of an autoharp, field recordings of crickets and other animals near a body of water, acoustic guitar strumming in an informal rhythm giving an identifiable form to the emotional expression even as one feels the other emotions though they can be challenging to identify in standard language, glimmerings of bell tones. This array of sensory stimulation through pure composition of sources can be subtle and dazzling. Later in the track a female sounding voice says “and if I’m being honest I’m scared that I’m going to harm myself beyond repair” before the soundscape takes a turn for the darker with more industrial type moods and more menacing drones and tonal swells, gibbering voices echoing in reverse delay like an interdimensional creature in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, rippling repeating textural bubbling, panning sounds like machines speaking and then more melodic chimes at the end like the peaceful sound of a time of agony fading out. It’s a work with a lot of depth and emotional nuance that can really only be described in that impressionistic way and one worth revisiting as it articulates a challenging emotional and psychological space with elegant poetry of sound design and organic structure. Listen to “your progresss” on Spotify and follow Kelly Garlick on Instagram. Garlick recently released an excellent album Wild Goose Victim on Multidim also available to stram on the Spotify link.
The Salesmen open “From Behind” with a vocal sample that sounds like something recorded in the 1940s or 1950s with an old man talking about a conversation he had with an “independent businessman” who complained about not being able to get poor people our narrator was saying he was trying to help and discouraging him from helping them. It turns out his so-called job paid $4 a day sunup to sundown and the narrator said it’s like slave wages and no wonder no one would work for him. But, really, isn’t that the kinds of conversations people have these days with massive income inequality hitting hard now but more like the famous frog example in systems theory but with the working class going back to the 1970s when austerity politics and economics began to be implemented in the banking and finance sector ahead of the Reagan administration and then accelerated over decades. So when the band kicks in with sounds like they grew up listening to a lot of weirdo art/progressive rock like Mr. Bungle and Frank Zappa alongside The MC5 and 1980s DC post-punk (i.e. Fugazi) it’s a fitting soundtrack to its lyrics about having to basically work yourself to death to survive often enough or certain not have enough time for yourself often enough. Certainly not many politicians are doing anything to put in regulations and corrections for this oppressive state of affairs like implementing modern monetary theory principles and putting in brakes on the accumulation of wealth and effectively ending the billionaire class with a robust return to anti-trust type of regulations put into place in the 1930s and 1940s including a full restoration of laws like the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. But The Salesmen in identifying some core issues with the song,and with the sample seem aware of American economic history, and setting it to the kind of psychedelic progressive punk on this song is more than a hint that people know that things have gotta change. Listen to “From Behind” on Spotify and follow The Salesmen at the links below.
JENTL brings a soulful introspection to his hazy pop song “Better For Me.” Accents of percussion and guitar touch at the edges of splashes of synth tone but the melody is ably carried by JENTL’s smooth vocals. He describes an immediately relatable feeling of how our own minds can sabotage our best intentions and instincts and reroute our energy into unproductive habits. JENTL questions the desire to get comfortable in the throes of a dysfunctional psychology because it inhibits the will to change. He ponders whether he’s a “good guy” but concedes “at least I try” and in that nugget of hope he finds the impetus to work toward behaviors and practices that are, yes, better for him. This deep exploration of personal accountability couched in lush atmospheres and luminous melodies just makes it seem like the best route overall and one that is easier than we might imagine when we’ve gotten comfortable with what are essentially self-destructive and soporifically twisted. This style of songwriting and purpose imbues the rest of JENTL’s new EP Terminal as well which released on April 7, 2023. Listen to “Better For Me” and the rest of the EP on Spotify and follow JENTL at the links below.
Richard Tripps’ ever so slightly husky voice lends an immediacy to “Dog Days” as he relates impressions of the end a time in life that feels comfortable and days pass at a leisurely pace because it’s too hot to do otherwise. But when that time ends, like a summer break or a summer vacation, you miss it a little and the people with whom you whiled-away the hours. Tripps expertly conveys that liminal moment. The percussion is light yet gives the song a vivid coherence. The synth, some of it sounding like a touch of Mellotron to give it a dreamlike haze, brings a charmingly whimsical spirit to the song and comes to the fore for an interlude before the outro. The song recalls the song “A Month of Sundays” by The Church from its underrated and top shelf 1984 album Remote Luxury and the way it conveys the way the relatively brief periods of leisure we get in life under the prevailing economic system allow us the time to stretch out our psyche to entertain the full feeling of life outside of the endless treadmill of productivity expected of us but which is antithetical to a full human life. Richard Tripps gives us a bit of that headspace with this song as well. Listen to “Dog Days” on Spotify and follow Richard Tripps on Instagram.
“Murmur” begins with what sounds like a loop of broken, distorted guitar before Cheree bursts into layered, near chaotic aggression. The programmed drums sound like a particularly disciplined hardcore or death metal drummer because the rhythms aren’t just steady and urgent but seem to sync in when the band goes off the map with rapid echoing guitar and unhinged vocals. It’s like the wildest and most cathartic industrial music fused with noise rock’s disregard for standard melodic structure and the righteous fury of both a grindcore and anarcho punk band. Listen to “Murmur” on Spotify where you can listen to the rest of the band’s 2023 album Factory which is fueled with a similar fervor, intensity and beautifully thorny aesthetic. Catch up with Oakland’s Cheree at the links below.
It’s tempting to call Bad Flamingo’s recent run of singles, and really much of its earlier output, Laurel Canyon Gothic. “Mountain Road” is crafted from delicately intricate folk rock style guitar work, strings and near whispered vocals and one hears in its sonic DNA the sensibilities and musical spirit Donovan absorbed from West Coast bands in the USA in the mid 60s before writing his own interpretation of that collective sound on his 1966 album Sunshine Superman. There are the ghosts of “Season of the Witch” haunting “Mountain Road.” But Bad Flamingo’s song seems to be another one about a partnership on the run from the enervating tendrils of mainstream society and fueled by personal myths and narratives and the romance of how the adventure of it all is exciting and the secret greatness shared between two people except that it’s precarious and the lifestyle doomed in the end. It’s a twenty-first century noir like a darker early Gordon Lightfoot song and yet another fine example of the duo’s unique and consistently engaging songwriting. Listen to “Mountain Road” on Spotify and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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