ALTER.NATiON
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| Marina Tadic / Eerie Wanda |
Eerie Wanda,
TOY, Royal Canoe, Mike Krol, FIDLAR, Rival Sons, William Tyler, Kamaal
Williams, Julia Kent, Mono, Swallow the Sun, The Writhing Squares
weekly favtraX
27-01-2019
Eerie Wanda is the brainchild of audio and visual artist Marina Tadic. Born to Croatian parents in the former Yugoslavia, Marina became a political refugee when she was just 6 years old. Forced to leave their home due to the Bosnian war, Marina’s parents sought asylum in the Netherlands- which is where Marina grew into an adult, became an accomplished artist, and where she still resides.
Her second LP, Pet Town is an exercise in isolated creativity. Using minimal recording techniques, Tadic shapes these ten songs from sheer intuition, while drawing inspiration from solitude. Although her two bandmates Jasper Verhulst and Jeroen de Heuvel are each relatively close geographically (residing in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Nijmegen), the band decided to record each of their parts alone, in their own homes. And weave the songs together remotely, like pen-pals making a quilt. "I've written the songs in a period of my life in which I was feeling quite alone. I wanted the recording process to feel like that too", says Marina.
Happy In The Hollow is entirely uncompromising: an atmospheric capturing of a state of mind that touches on Post Punk, electronic dissonance, acid folk and Krautrock. Familiar qualities like metronomic rhythms, warping guitars, undulating synths and Tom’s gentle, reedy vocals are all in there, but so is a greater emphasis on melody, a wider scope, and a combining of the reassuring and the sinister that is as unnerving as it is captivating.'
The sound has without doubt expanded — and grown more confident — in part because this is the first album for which Toy has become a self-sufficient five-person unit doing everything for themselves.
Waver, the fourth proper LP from Canadian art-pop sextet Royal Canoe, finds the band trying to whittle away a few layers from their quirky, genre-inclusive approach. Largely self-produced with some help from engineer John Paul Peters, the ten-song set follows the Winnipeg band's breakout sophomore album, 2013's Juno-nominated Today We're Believers, and its overly busy follow-up, Something Got Lost Between Here and the Orbit, which came out in 2016 and was helmed by Animal Collective producer Ben Allen. Royal Canoe's ambitious mashup of pop, hip-hop, soul, and math-inclined rock rides the fine line between wishing to entertain and challenge listeners, veering frequently to one side or the other and occasionally failing to achieve either task.
Most of the garage-punk acts that have emerged in the wake of Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees in the 2010s have been bands with no small amount of studied cool lurking behind their sweaty energy. Mike Krol is a vital exception to this rule; Krol is far too concerned with pumping out his fuzzy, no-frills, hook-infused rock and laying his heart out for all to see to have much truck with being cool. And that's a large part of what makes his music work so well. Krol clearly has a sense of humor and isn't trying to reinvent the wheel, but it's clear that rock & roll means a lot to him.
Taking the acronym that forms their name ("F*ck it dog, life's a risk") as a literal credo, L.A. garage punks FIDLAR try their best to evolve past the dumb but somewhat endearing slackery of their early days with Almost Free, their difficult third full-length. For a band whose primary themes involved getting baked, getting wasted, skating, and partying, the growing pains that come with trying to be taken more seriously are going to be tough. Their spotty sophomore release, 2016's Too, wrestled with frontman Zac Carper's newfound sobriety in the face of the group's chosen lifestyle and typical subject matter; on Almost Free, they further complicate things by introducing some politics and social commentary into the mix. To their credit, FIDLAR have made legitimate attempts to get out of their creative comfort zone and go somewhere new.
Fuzzed-out classic rock revivalists from Los Angeles whose sound evokes the bluesy sound of legendary bands like Led Zeppelin. Evoking the bluesy rock of bands like Led Zeppelin and the Black Crowes, California's Rival Sons emerged in 2012 as hard rock classicists with a modern edge thanks to their breakout second album Pressure & Time. Establishing a strong collaborative bond with Nashville producer Dave Cobb to helm each of their albums... Since debuting in 2009 with the self-released Before the Fire, Long Beach, California's Rival Sons have been on a tear, delivering a refreshingly unfussy blast of blues-blasted hard rock on an almost yearly basis...
William Tyler’s new record, Goes West, is the best music that he’s ever made. I’m sure of this because I know and love all of his music intimately, and this album moves me the most, and the most consistently. The first time I heard it was in the late spring in the Texas Hill Country, rolling between limestone and scrub. I was on a cleanse then—no alcohol, no drugs, no evil thoughts—and was astonished at the emotional clarity that the album held. It offered up a model for what I wanted my head to feel like. Goes West marks a sort of narrowing of focus for William’s music; it sounds as though he found a way to point himself directly towards the rich and bittersweet emotional center of his music without being distracted by side trips...
Kamaal Williams (aka Henry Wu) follows his universally acclaimed 2018 full-length The Return with this two-track 12" single that, because of its compositional and improvisational acumen, plays more like an EP despite its relatively brief playing time... The flipside, "Snitches Brew," with its left-field nod to Miles Davis in the title, is a trio affair produced by Wu and recorded and mixed by Syed Adam Jaffrey. It hosts the producer on synth bass, Mansur Brown on electric guitar, and the wonderful Dexter Hercules on drum kit. It's introduced by a jagged synth bass bubbling in an angular, insistent riff with double-timed snare, kick drum, and cymbals by Hercules, who is clearly seeking the tune's bleeding edge. When Brown enters with his wah-wah pedal, things get wonky. While it doesn't sound much like Davis, it does recall the more cosmic funk traverses of early Weather Report à la Sweetnighter and Mysterious Traveler. Halfway through, the tempo increases and Wu's bassline is merely the anchor as Brown uses his instruments as exploratory tools and Hercules breaks the beat, adding weight and balance to the atmospheric textures..
Cellist/composer Julia Kent's fifth solo album primarily consists of pieces written for dance and theatre productions. As with her previous releases, she uses looping devices and electronics to frame her intense, rhythmic cello playing, sometimes building up to turbulent, choppy waves. The majority of these pieces clearly sound conceived with choreography in mind, evenly progressing and introducing more dramatic sections at a logical pace...
With Nowhere Now Here, their tenth album, Japan's Mono celebrates their 20th anniversary. They've expanded their sonic palette and continued to keep a close ear on their roots even as they've woven ambient sounds, cinematic power metal, and dissonance into a unique melodic sensibility at once fragile and beautful. Often using chamber and symphony orchestras, they've built on their dynamic contrasts -- dark and light, violence and stillness, chaos and tranquility -- with a remarkable, emotionally potent consistency.
Nowhere Now Here recombines most of the elemental musical traits apparent throughout the band's history, while adding electronics to their arsenal. The quartet has undergone its first personnel change with drummer Dahm Majuri Cipolla replacing Yasunori Takada...
...When a Shadow Is Forced Into the Light's title is drawn from a Stanbridge lyric. Its songs are more melodic than anything in STS's catalog. Instead of bone-crushing doom-death metal, they deliver atmospheric post-metal undergirded by gothic rock with shards of black metal and doom. The title-track opener eases the listener into the darkness with the sound of roaring wind, ritualistic drums, and a processional modal melody. Its swirl is elucidated by strummed acoustic guitars, languid keyboards, and vocalist Mikko Kotamäki at his most soothing...
Even though Philly-based band the Writhing Squares is made up of just two people, they conjure enough layers of sonic sludge to sound not just like a large band on full power, but a wall of beautifully gnarled noise calling out from the depths of a black hole. Building on the clatter of decidedly primitive drum-machine rhythms, Daniel Provenzano's overdriven bass lines wobble and churn as his bandmate Kevin Nickles fills in any space with tentacular waves of saxophone, delay-drenched vocals and deep-fried electronics. Their numbers are small but the sound is far from minimal...
Eerie Wanda, TOY, Royal Canoe, Mike Krol, FIDLAR, Rival Sons, William Tyler, Kamaal Williams, Julia Kent, Mono, Swallow the Sun, The Writhing Squares
