ALTER.NATiON #024
weekly favtraX
02-03-2019
Stroppies - Entropy from Whoosh
After releasing a couple of strong, home-cooked, and charmingly lo-fi records, Stroppies decided to see if their small sound would work in a larger studio setting. They took two days to lay down as much as they could in a professional environment, then took the tapes home to work on the songs some more. After a long period of fooling around, adding and subtracting sounds, and almost driving themselves crazy with self-doubt, the band decided they were done and 2019's Whoosh was the result.
The Black Keys - Lo/Hi
It took the Black Keys nine years to become one of the biggest rock bands in America, an honor that is at once shockingly difficult yet nearly bereft of any real competition... “Lo/Hi,” the Black Keys’ first song in five years, opens with a revitalized yelp from Auerbach, but it sounds like no time has passed at all. They’re still sleepily ripping off ZZ Top and there’s a demonic little solo two minutes in that could reignite the white-hot suburban-dad beef between Auerbach and the Whole Foods to his Trader Joe’s, Jack White... One promising new development in the duo’s sound is the addition of soulful female backup singers, Nashville’s Leisa Hans and Ashley Wilcoxson, who introduce a welcome texture to a tune that’s otherwise wholly unsurprising.
Black Mountain - Future Shade
Vancouver psychedelic rock outfit and Jagjaguwar mainstays Black Mountain are back this year with a new album, Destroyer... The warping, rending new song is also the new album’s opening track. Frontman Stephen McBean says it has a riff that “traveled around the world then hit the bong with a chorus a year and a half later.” He goes on: “A last attempt at double frosting produced a chorus on chorus death match. Anxiety is the new heavy metal.”
When Royal Trux's late-2010s reunion led them into the studio to make new music, there was a small hope that Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema might go even further with the freewheeling experiments that have been missing from indie rock since they disbanded in 2001.Instead, for better or worse, White Stuff sounds like an amalgam of Accelerator, Veterans of Disorder, and Pound for Pound... While fans of Royal Trux's inventiveness might find more of that in Hagerty's and Herrema's solo work, White Stuff is still another entertaining part of a reunion that once seemed impossible.
Earth - Cats On The Briar
“I wanted this to be a ‘sexy’ record, a record acknowledging the ‘witchy’ and ‘sensual’ aspects in the music,” he adds. “Sort of a ‘witch’s garden’ kind of theme, with references to mind altering plants and animals that people have always held superstitious beliefs towards. A conjuror or root doctor’s herbarium of songs, as it were.”
...they’ve shared the monumental, majestic instrumental track “Cats On The Briar,” which is “simultaneously uplifting and ominous, with a sense of perilous beauty,” as Carlson tells Consequence Of Sound. “It was the first song written for the new album. Inspired by a vision of my wife, Holly, dancing through a desert landscape, filled with dangerous flora and fauna.”
Stef Chura - Method Man
Lead single “Method Man” is hooky and blasting, a gnarly pulse of guitars delivered with swagger. “He is a method man/ Sipping on a taurine can/ Rippin’ up a box of books he says I’ll never understand,” Chura repeats, switching up rhythms halfway through, expressing frustration with being thought of as less-than.
Stephen Malkmus - Come Get Me
The song itself is one of the less electronically oriented tracks on Groove Denied — more like a classic Malkmus rocker with a slight machine edge to it, or “warped psych” as Malkmus himself refers to it. “Won’t somebody come get me?” he sings. “I’m all alone here, I can’t see/ Any reason to wallow/ In this decanter.”
Facs - Total History
The Chicago noise-rock trio FACS are especially good at what they do. As demonstrated on two advance tracks from their upcoming sophomore album Lifelike, that involves layering waves of ominous sound atop tightly wound grooves until you feel trapped inside claustrophobic nightmare that’s also somehow liberating... with an even gnarlier exercise in tension-building. It’s called “Total History,” and it rules.
For decades, the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle has been writing these incredibly dense and evocative lyrics. And even though he’s now a respected, award-nominated author, he’s still cranking out new music. Last month, the Mountain Goats announced that they’d release the new album In League With Dragons this spring... now come out with “Cadaver Sniffing Dog,” a song that describes a gruesome crime scene. As ever, Darnielle holds back in big-picture details, instead describing a setting where some horrible crime has just taken place: “Stray clumps of hair and blood and brain / Fragments of bone in the drain / Rookies trying to keep the airway clear / But the damage is too severe.”
The song also includes hints about something more fantastical: “Leopards on their hands and knees / Nobody’s ready for days like these.” And are there actual dogs who sniff cadavers? Musically, the song is choppier than “Younger,” built on a driving and slightly obtuse riff. There’s a squirmy, Sonny Sharrock-esque guitar solo in there, too.
Sebadoh - Celebrate the Void
Indie rock legends Sebadoh are back this spring with their first new album in more than six years. Titled Act Surprised, it was written and recorded after Lou Barlow moved back to Northampton, Massachusetts and reconnected with bandmates Jason Loewenstein and Bob D’Amico...
Here’s Barlow’s statement:
"The first line of this song: “I get the feeling you don’t feel me” is pretty good. It could be a line in an Ariana Grande song, I like it. I followed it from there through some general complaints about a composite character in my life, someone I could never crack. Sometimes the walls are too high. If you think about it, the resistance was always there, even in the very beginning. What to do? Pick endlessly at the seams? Replay moments in my head looking for a way to explain it all? No, stop, there is no one answer and that’s OK…Celebrate the void."
You will not be surprised to learn that “Celebrate The Void” sounds a lot more like ’90s indie rock than ’10s pop.
Bobby Long - Serpentine
...That friction works in spades on “Serpentine,” a driving, ominous mini-epic with a slithering guitar lead and lyrics that bemoan the vagaries of co-dependence. “The riff I had for a while—that was one of the more instinctive songs, really,” says Long. “I have a lot of wonderful women in my life who seem to dote on me, from my mom to my wife to my sisters. It’s more of an ode to them.”
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| Bobby Long with Jack Dawson |
The Stroppies, The Black Keys, Black Mountain, Royal Trux, Stef Chura, Stephen Malkmus, Facs, The Mountain Goats, Sebadoh, Bobby Long
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