"Kitten With a Whip" > 079 ALTER.NATION.MiX weekly favtraX 29-03-2020

ALTER.NATION #79

The Flytraps, Sorry, Waxahatchee, Kandace Springs, The Wants, Facs, Childish Gambino, Pearl Jam, Activity, Cable Ties, Deeper, Windy & Carl

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"Kitten With a Whip"

ALTER.NATION #79 on DEEZER

A raw and raucous female-dominated Orange County combo steeped in punk, garage, and hard rock... the Flytraps make hard-driving music with the sneering attitude and fifth-gear pace of old-school punk, the melodic and lyrical sensibilities of garage rock, and the beefy, overdriven attack of hard rock. Fronted by the gritty howl of singer and bassist Kristen Cooper and the crunchy guitar work of Beth Boyd, the Flytraps first emerged on the West Coast garage rock scene...
The Flytraps - Wild Card / Kitten With a Whip
Listen up, Tuff Gurls of the world: you have a new comrade, and she's a real asset to the team. Her name is Kristen Cooper, and she sings lead and plays bass in the Flytraps, a rockin' combo from Orange County, California whose first proper album, 2020's Wild Card, is a soul-satisfying blast of hard-rockin' attitude, howling guitars, and Cooper's flamethrower vocals... Cooper may be center stage on Wild Card, but her bandmates do more than their share to give her the raw power she needs. Beth Boyd and Chloe Z. Young are a heavyweight tag-team guitar combination, setting up a Wall of Sound that brings together the band's punk, garage, and hard rock influences with high style and enough crunch for a year's supply of corn flakes, while drummer Fabian Ruiz manages to not only keep up with these troublemakers, he gives them the fuel to push this music into orbit. You could say that the Flytraps are mining a sound and style that have been around since the Runaways bought their first guitars, and you wouldn't be wrong, but any story can sound fresh if it's told in the right way, and Wild Card tells the tale like a master... (Mark Deming)

A North London band with a mercurial style, Sorry was started by two best friends and first surfaced with a few mixtape-styled collections of home demos. They brought a wildly experimental sound influenced by everything from trip-hop, '90s alt rock, and early trap to their 2020 debut album 925.
Sorry - 925 / More
London indie shape-shifters Sorry first began getting attention with their self-released home demos that jumped from slinky trip-hop to nervous post-punk to dreamy shoegaze and more with each new song. An experimental pop group led by childhood friends Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen, Sorry's willingness to try anything and everything with their songs was one of their most exciting attributes. In the hands of lesser songwriters, this anything-goes approach could have resulted in messy, disjointed ugliness, but Sorry threaded all their wildly disparate directions together with a vivid personality. Much like their early demos and singles, the wandering ideas on Sorry's debut album, 925, work because of how strong the songwriting is in whatever shape it takes... (Fred Thomas)

Following the breakup of a band and a relationship, songwriter Katie Crutchfield emerged with this confessional solo project.
Waxahatchee - Saint Cloud / Oxbow
Following the defiant alt-rock of her John Agnello-produced fourth album, Out in the Storm, Katie Crutchfield makes another adjustment to the course of her one-time bedroom project Waxahatchee with the warmer, more contemplative Saint Cloud. Shedding distortion in favor of a more easygoing, country-rock sensibility, the album's backing band is perhaps the best indicator of its sound; joining her throughout are Bonny Doon's Bill Lennox and Bobby Colombo, Bonny Light Horseman's Josh Kaufman, and Elvis Perkins in Dearland's Nick Kinsey. Saint Cloud's cover art underscores the approach with a photo of Crutchfield striking a pose on a pickup truck...

Refined singer/songwriter and keyboardist who wowed Prince, performed at Paisley Park, signed to Blue Note, and debuted in 2014.
Kandace Springs feat. David Sanborn- The Women Who Raised Me / I Put a Spell on You
...Honoring the women who raised her has always been one of Springs' facets -- she has also evoked other inspirations less obviously with vocal nuances -- but the singer and pianist does it in concentrated form with her third Blue Note album. Like Soul Eyes, The Women Who Raised Me was produced by Larry Klein, who tracked it live with bassist Scott Colley, drummer Clarence Penn, and guitarist Steve Cardenas providing economical and softly luminous core support... (Andy Kellman)

At once confrontational and melodic, Brooklyn's the Wants make music informed by Anglophilic post-punk, the nonstop rhythms of industrial and techno, and Rust Belt grit. Featuring members of Bodega, the band shares a similar sense of political outrage, but channels it in more experimental and inward-looking ways on releases such as 2020's debut album Container.
The Wants - Container / Clearly a Crisis
The Wants – ‘Container’ review: punk-funkers’ debut is the soundtrack to a lockdown party
Fans of Interpol, Depeche Mode, LCD Soundsystem and Gang of Four – meet your favourite new band 
The album artwork for ‘Container’ displays cans of tinned food – stockpiling chic, if you will – while portentous song titles such as ‘Fear My Society’ and ‘Clearly A Crisis’ could hardly chime more with the doomy current climate if they arrived with vouchers for contraband hand sanitiser. Comprised of two members of New York art-punks Bodega – Madison Velding-VanDam and bassist Heather Elle – and completed by drummer Jason Gates, the confident self-produced debut from The Wants is riven with taut anxiety and a sense of looming dread. Yet it’s also a collection of razor-sharp pop songs that gleam through the gloom. They mine the sinuous basslines and euphoric bleakness of post-punk outfits such as Gang Of Four (with Velding-Van-Dam’s lyrics seemingly similarly preoccupied with stripping away the lies of capitalist and consumerist culture) and the dancefloor nous of bands from their home city (think LCD Soundsystem). So while ‘Clearly A Crisis’ apes Andy Gill’s distinctive, serrated slashes of guitar... (Gary Ryan)

Playing dark, propulsive music that stands at the intersection of post-punk and post-rock, Facs formed from the ashes of the like-minded Chicago outfit Disappears.
Facs - Void Moments  / Void Walker
For Facs, redefining themselves and their music is a way of life. Fortunately, they're consistently great at it. Void Moments is the band's second album with bassist Alianna Kalaba, and it feels like the stability of their lineup allowed them to be even more daring with their music. Even when they pared their sound down to its bones on Negative Houses, Facs have never been a simple proposition. However, on their third full-length they give the melodies, harmonies, and textures they introduced on Lifelike even more depth... on the standout "Void Walker," each member of Facs traces different trajectories that complement each other perfectly... (Heather Phares)

Childish Gambino - 3.15.2020 / Algorhythm
...The end result is a challenging, hooky, mysterious and odd record that feels like it was built out of pieces left over from a collision between Outkast, David Bowie, Sly and the Family Stone, and Prince. Add in bits borrowed from Flaming Lips, Tyler the Creator and Lee Perry, and it's a mad scientist's take on modern pop with Glover at the middle alternately crooning with honey-dipped sweetness, rapping menacingly, crying out in pain, and telling tales. The sounds may be somewhat familiar, but there's always a twist or left turn to keep things shocking. And they never stick to one idea when two or three would make things more interesting. Why not mix a totally hooky chorus with a frightening, growled robo-rap ("Algorithm")...

The prototypical Seattle grunge band, with a driving sound and a long run as one of the most principled and hard-working groups in rock.
Pearl Jam - Gigaton / Quick Escape
...Maybe it's the times, maybe it's the choice to switch producers -- the group swapped their longtime collaborator Brendan O'Brien for Josh Evans, who co-produced the album with the band -- but Gigaton hits with the strength of a full-force gale. Weather is a galvanizing concern on Gigaton, with Pearl Jam structuring their tenth album around the looming climate change crisis. There's little subtlety in this regard: the title refers to the amount of ice lost at the arctic poles, the album's cover depicts a melting glacier, and the lyrics are lousy with apocalyptic imagery, not all of it derived from the climate. Eddie Vedder repeatedly and explicitly wrangles with Donald J. Trump, his righteous anger spilling outside the confines of "Quick Escape"...

Meditative post-punk act comprised of former Grooms, Russian Baths, and Field Mouse members. Building on the legacy of its members' former groups Grooms, Russian Baths, and Field Mouse, Activity combines post-punk and electronics as fluently as they blur the boundaries between ominous and comforting moods on their 2020 debut, Unmask Whoever.
Activity - Unmask Whoever / The Heartbeats
Mixing electronica and dream-pop, Activity is a new four-piece formed of Grooms duo Travis Johnson and Steve Levine, bassist Zoë Browne (Field Mouse) and guitarist Jess Rees (Russian Baths). Unmask Whoever, produced with the help of Psychic TV’s Jeff Berner, speaks to the quartet’s resolve to undermine and subvert the norms of modern indie-rock.

Fiercely D.I.Y. Melbourne-based three-piece delivering a blast of garage-infused punk rock. Led by the abrasive guitars and powerful vocals of Jenny McKenchie, Australian punks Cable Ties blur the lines of punk and rock, with angsty dissonance that has just a hint of AC/DC influence hiding beneath the noise. After forming in 2015, the band played often in Melbourne's D.I.Y. circles and captured their growling sound on albums like 2020's Far Enough.
Cable Ties - Far Enough / Sandcastles
The second album from Melbourne, Australia’s Cable Ties brings a towering wall of ’70s hard rock and proto-punk to songs that explore hope, despair, and anger but offer no easy answers. Cable Ties’ fundamental elements—a driving rhythm section, anxious and emotive guitar playing, defiant, passionate songwriting, and Jenny McKechnie’s earthshaking voice—are complicated on Far Enough by nuance and ambivalence.

A Chicago quartet whose merging of jagged post-punk and spare, sophisticated indie rock earned regional acclaim in the mid-2010s, Deeper is the work of singer/guitarist Nic Gohl, guitarist Mike Clawson, bassist Drew McBride, and drummer Shiraz Bhatti. 
Deeper - Auto-Pain / This Heat
Following two years after their eponymous debut, Auto-Pain marks a tonal shift into darker and sparser territory for Chicago post-punks Deeper. The jagged, anxious, but still organic feel that marked their first effort has given way to a harsher, almost mechanical approach that utilizes open space and repetition as a means to work through rather than stave off suffering. Initially conceived as an interconnected concept album, singer/guitarist Nic Gohl claims that he took inspiration from Aldous Huxley's dystopian classic Brave New World, in which a fictional government-issued drug called soma was used to numb all unwanted emotions...

Beloved Michigan space rock duo whose expansive, ethereal drones have influenced numerous ambient and post-rock artists.
Windy & Carl - Allegiance and Conviction / Crossing Over
Dearborn, Michigan's Windy & Carl have been crafting their singular form of free-flowing ambient space rock since the early 1990s, influencing legions of post-rock and drone musicians throughout the decades.

The duo have mostly remained active, often issuing limited cassettes, LPs, and digital releases through their own Blue Flea imprint or other small labels, but all of their main full-lengths from 1998's Depths onwards have appeared on Chicago's venerable Kranky. Arriving eight years after the dazzling We Will Always Be, 2020's Allegiance and Conviction is one of their most concise albums, with no songs reaching ten minutes, and in some ways it feels like one of their rawest works since the early days... Expressing a wide range of emotions in a short timespan, Allegiance and Conviction is a vivid, engrossing experience, and just as vital as every other entry in Windy & Carl's unbeatable catalog.

The Flytraps, Sorry, Waxahatchee, Kandace Springs, The Wants, Facs, Childish Gambino, Pearl Jam, Activity, Cable Ties, Deeper, Windy & Carl