ALTER.NATiON #019
weekly favtraX
03-02-2019
Le Butcherettes is a band out of Guadalajara, Mexico, and are currently based in El Paso, Texas. The band consists of: Riko Rodriguez-Lopez (guitar), Marfred Rodriguez-Lopez (bass) and Alejandra Robles Luna (drums). Le Butcherettes are lead by their firebrand lead singer, Teri Gender Bender (Teresa Suarez Coscio). Gender Bender is the center of the hurricane, and she keeps everything around her swirling with chaotic precision. Her voice is a work of art. When she sings, she sounds like a revolution.
Le Butcherettes’ last three albums were produced by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (At The Drive-In, The Mars Volta) on his own record label. Now with a new home, Rise Records, Le Butcherettes have brought in legend and icon Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads) to draw out a new and creative sound. Harrison both tightens and stretches out the guitar runs, and emphasizes the thump/thump/thump rhythm that Robles-Luna delivers—providing the intense immediacy needed for each track. Harrison handles Gender Bender in the most effective way possible – he stays out of her way. Harrison allows Gender Bender to tap in and bleed out her soul like an open vein...
My Morning Jacket backing up Tim Showalter on a Strand Of Oaks record is such an inspired idea that I almost can’t believe it really happened, and the first song from that album lives up to all that promise. “Weird Ways” showcases so much of what makes both these bands special. Showalter has a gift for melodies that soar like wounded birds triumphantly returning to the sky; his hooks worked wonders when Strand Of Oaks was still a humble folk-rock project, and they sound even more spectacular in the context of ragged-glory arena rock... Showalter has talked about how he almost quit music before MMJ’s Carl Broemel coaxed him back into the game. Throughout “Weird Ways,” he reckons with that turnaround. “I don’t feel it anymore,” he laments at the start. As the music begins to swell up around him, he remembers the value of “what you make and the people you’ve loved,” and soon he’s facing down the prospect of getting back to work: “Grind your teeth and cut off all your sleeves/ A few good riffs and a sticky bag of green/ You said before, ‘It’s not as bad as it seems/ A grownup kid gets to live out all his dreams.'” By the end, a melancholy euphoria comes roaring across the ceiling, and he’s successfully converted his own redemption arc into the stuff of legend.
The best punk songs can be built out of almost nothing: a singular feeling, a seething and focused rage. “Conspiracy Theories” is that kind of song. There are only a handful of words to it, but each time they’re uttered you can taste the bile behind it.
The track comes from a source of frustration in the DC music community — namely, that pizza place and venue Comet Ping Pong has become the center of a fringe theory that has resulted in a constant state of anxiety and fear for those that work or go there. “Conspiracy Theories” is an effort to shake all of that tension off, a wriggling wave of a song centered around a universal fuck you. Gauche has a strong pedigree — its members include Priests’ Daniele Yandel, Downtown Boys’ Mary Jane Regalado, and Jason P Barnett — and that means the song is tight and controlled, a circle of anger that invites you in, that cannot be silenced.
“What if I can’t calm down, and I don’t have that in my bloodline?” Meg Duffy worries on “can’t calm down,” the newest song from the upcoming Hand Habits album placeholder. Just as they pose the question, the anxious riff that snakes through the song’s verses breaks into a jangling sigh, Duffy’s voice intertwining in lovely harmony with Land Of Talk frontwoman Elizabeth Powell’s. Hand Habits’ music takes friction and pain and doubt and turns it into something profoundly comforting. And here, they contemplate the toll of “ancestral damage,” ingrained patterns of learned behavior that cast a long shadow over all of our future relationships. Can we ever break free of the cycles of trauma that shape us? There are no easy answers, and they don’t pretend there are. But on “can’t calm down,” the very act of trying becomes a thing of great beauty.
Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers’ new collaborative project Better Oblivion Community Center is a gift endowed to a very specific kind of music fan. It’s a sick but welcome joke. Though they’re from different generations, the two songwriters mostly traffic in music that is depressing bordering on existential, funny and sad at the same time. Both craft lyrics that are hyper-specific streams of consciousness, and the best songs on Better Oblivion Community Center sound like two people jumping down one another’s throats — urgent and unkempt, totally in the moment.
“Dylan Thomas” best exemplifies that collision of ideas and energy. It’s named for the Welsh poet who died at 39 and was a legendary alcoholic. The protagonist they’ve developed is an alienated individual exhausted by the play-by-play headlines of today’s age and seeks out escapism in all of the wrong places: the bar, a pricey silent retreat, other people. In this song, everything is a stand-in for a certain truth, one that is just beyond the protagonist’s grasp. “The ghost is just a kid in a sheet,” Oberst and Bridgers sing, alluding to the cover of her breakout album Stranger In The Alps...
Brutus’ new LP, Nest, opens with a song called — for real — “Fire.” Nest’s album-announcing advance single is called “War.” Now, if you’re gonna lead with shit like that? If that is how you are introducing yourself to the world? Man, you better be 100% ready to back it. To bring it. You cannot be fucking around. The first words out of Stefanie Mannaerts’ mouth on “War” are “Our world/ It’s gone.” She sings the line with enough focus and force to shatter glaciers, asserting in no uncertain terms: Brutus are not fucking around...The whole thing just gets heavier. It’s a breathtaking, heart-stopping, truly visceral piece of music. The song’s title comes in when Mannaerts sings the line, “Unleash your war.” Hear that? It is a challenge. If you want war? Baby, you got it. Brutus are ready. If you want fire? Man, it’s already lit. Brutus are bringing it. Right fucking here.
“Some songs are essays, other songs are haikus,” Ezra Koenig told Rolling Stone in an interview previewing Vampire Weekend’s new 18-track opus Father Of The Bride... Whereas the five-minute “Harmony Hall” reads as a statement of purpose for a songwriter who’s been silent for the better part of a decade.
Vampire Weekend songs tend to be multilayered creations: refusing to be confined by genre, refracting big-picture epiphanies through personal experience. Thus “Harmony Hall,” a lament about the resurgence of anti-semitism in America’s “dignified” power centers, finds its shape through links to Koenig’s own life. The title refers to a dorm at Columbia, the Petri dish in which this band was cultured. The chorus repurposes a lyric from one of Koenig’s old songs (you call it lazy, I call it intertextual). The music calls back to his old affection for Paul Simon and ornate instrumental flourishes. You could not mistake this song for anyone else...
At this point, you pretty much know what you’re going to get from a Makthaverskan song when you hit play. The Swedish crew has been pumping out towering dream-pop songs for a decade (!) now, but they consistently work at such an elevated level that they can pull from the same bag of tricks over and over again and still deliver. “Onkel,” the B-side to their latest 7″, has everything you’d want and expect from Makthaverskan — a soaring vocal melody, a jangly intensity, a crystalline finish. And here Maja Miller uses those sunny components to scrape at the confusion and darkness of loneliness and uncertainty: “I’ve had too much to drink/ And no one’s here with me,” she wails. “Where can I go?/ I just don’t know/ I’m so alone.”
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have always known how to boogie. They already have a song called “Cut Throat Boogie” and another called “The Bitter Boogie.” But now, they’re doing a different kind of boogie. They’re doing the “Cyboogie.”
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have never known how to sit still. The Australian goon squad released a ridiculous five albums in 2017, ranging from freaked-out prog-psych to pastoral jazz-folk to hard-charging garage-rock. And yet “Cyboogie,” with its tongue-in-cheek novelty sci-fi flair, still feels different from anything they’ve done before.
For one thing, there are no guitars. Five of the band’s seven members play synth on the track. The result is a monstrous seven-minute electro-glam groove that sounds a little bit like Daft Punk singing about a depressed robot over Tame Impala’s “Elephant.” If you’re not sold by the 50th vocodered “BOOGIE!,” I just don’t know what to tell you.
After three albums in two years with his psych quintet the Silence, ex-Ghost musical guru Masaki Batoh returns to his solo roots for Nowhere, an album on which he wrote all songs and played all instruments... "Devil Got Me," is a wonky, psychedelic, slide-guitar blues in Japanese; the Skip James and Robert Johnson feel here is unmistakable... Nowhere is Batoh's most provocative yet accessible solo album; its otherworldly strangeness is uncompromising, but somehow welcoming because of its deep focus. Its many textured ripples, fissures and psychic pathways resonate long after its playing timer expires.
As striking as Unloved's mix of '60s pop and cinematic mystique was on Guilty of Love, at times their debut album felt like a soundtrack in search of a story -- which isn't surprising, considering that two-thirds of the band are respected composers for film and television. In BBC's spy thriller Killing Eve -- to which they contributed Guilty of Love tracks as well as a virtual album's worth of previously unreleased music -- David Holmes, Keefus Ciancia, and singer/songwriter Jade Vincent found their perfect project. The show and its brilliantly unhinged hitwoman Villanelle reflected Unloved's postmodern femme fatale vibe perfectly, and allowed them to push their boundaries with mercurial tracks that made the most of their seductive, dangerous sound. Unloved's evolution continues on Heartbreak, an album that presents the most skillful balance of their pop and experimental sides to date. With savvy, they kick things off with some of their catchiest songs.
The winding path of Cherry Glazerr's evolution began with bandleader Clementine Creevy writing strange and often juvenile songs as a teenager and just several years later had moved through phases of quirky garage grunge to arrive at the cold, polished sheen of third album Stuffed & Ready. Always centered around Creevy's increasingly dark musings, each album has upped production and more accurately dialed in a re-creation of '90s grunge angst. The muscular power chords and hyperconfident thrust of 2017's Apocalipstick were a far cry from the spooky songs about grilled cheese sandwiches and house pets that the band started out with, and Stuffed & Ready pushes further in the direction of '90s-modelled loud-soft alt-rock. Nowhere near the garage punk outbursts or naïve pondering that earlier versions of Cherry Glazerr reveled in, the ten songs here use gloomy guitar blasts and mid-tempo rhythmic attacks as a steady framework for the distant, angular moods of Creevy's songs. The tracks that stray most from this formula are the most interesting. "Daddi" laces its eerie verses with synth arpeggios, ticking drum machine hi-hats, and manipulated vocal samples, with Creevy's ghostly vocals recalling early Blonde Redhead before exploding into huge choruses...
Le Butcherettes, Strand Of Oaks, Gauche, Hand Habits, Better Oblivion Community Center, Brutus, Vampire Weekend, Makthaverskan, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Masaki Batoh, Unloved, Cherry Glazerr
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