ALTER.NATION #73
The Heliocentrics, The Men, The Third Mind, Le Butcherettes, Shadow Show, Post Animal, Bambara, Puss N Boots, Habibi, Nathaniel Rateliff, Katie Gately, Rejoicer, Oded Tzur
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"Burning Wooden Ship"
The Heliocentrics - Infinity of Now / Burning Wooden Ship
...The Infinity of Now is the Heliocentrics debut offering for Madlib's Madlib Invazion label. Vocalist Barbora Patkova returns to the fold as a full member. She appears on most of the album, including the set's first mind-melting single, "Burning Wooden Ship." Paced by Catto's funky breakbeat shuffle, reverb, analogue synth blips, Dan Smith's open-tuned modal guitars, and a Krautrock bassline, these traits commingle in a droning melody, before the instruments clash amid a dubwise mix, as Patkova effortlessly croons through the middle... The anxious and slippery "Don't Bleed, You're in the Middle of the Forest" stacks layers of vocal overdubs on top of a sinister groove, creating an ominous atmosphere as Gender Bender sings of a metaphorical hunt taking unexpected turns...
The Men - Mercy / Wading in Dirty Water
Mercy is the Men's third consecutive album with the same lineup, but as ever, the Brooklyn-based group never stays in the same place stylistically. The release continues in the eclectic mode of 2018's Drift, rather than the back-to-basics noise-punk of 2016's Devil Music. All seven songs are vastly different, making Mercy sound like it could be a compilation of tracks from separate albums released throughout a band's long career, but mostly dating from the '70s and '80s... "Wading in Dirty Water" sounds like a ten-minute excerpt of a jam session which never begins or ends, fading in with glistening keyboards and a steadily trotting rhythm, then following its brief verses with a bounty of acid guitar soloing...
The Third Mind - The Third Mind / East West (Paul Butterfield Blues Band cover)
As a musician who has passionately advocated for American roots music since the Blasters released their first album in 1980, Dave Alvin is widely regarded as a traditionalist, which is not as accurate as it would seem at first glance. Alvin grew up on free jazz, psychedelia, and hard rock along with the blues, rockabilly, country, and jump jazz sounds that inform his best-known work, and his project the Third Mind is a step outside his usual boundaries that lets him explore ideas he hasn't approached in the past. Alvin was inspired by reading a book on Miles Davis that outlined his methods for composing and recording several of his major fusion albums of the '70s: Miles would call out a key, set a tempo, and he and his band would improvise at length. After the fact, he and his producer would edit the long jams into a more practical shape. Alvin assembled a set of versatile players to try something similar -- David Immerglück on guitar and keyboards, Victor Krummenacher on bass, Michael Jerome on drums, and Jesse Sykes on guitar and vocals -- though for most of the Third Mind's debut album, they gave themselves a safety net that Miles didn't... and when the group dig deeper into Alice Coltrane's "Journey in Satchidananda" and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's "East/West," the communication between the players is smart and exciting. (Whether you actually need three different versions of "East/West," the shortest of which is 14 minutes, is an open question, but each one here is honestly engaging.) Alvin's roots in the blues certainly play a big role in The Third Mind, but so does hard rock, psychedelia, jazz, and improvisational music, and this context -- essentially a jam band without audibly hippie-like tendencies -- shows that his willingness to take a risk pays off handsomely.
Le Butcherettes - Don't Bleed / Don't Bleed, You're in the Middle of the Forest
With their fourth album, 2019's monstrous bi/Mental, genre-warping punk band Le Butcherettes went through the emotional wringer investigating mental illness, inter-generational trauma, and family strife. Led by the explosive presence of vocalist/guitarist/band founder Teri Gender Bender, the group wavered stylistically on that album between shadowy electronic/rock hybrids and all-out arena rock ragers. The seven-song EP Don't Bleed pushes Le Butcherettes' restless muse even further, getting into new sonic territory on almost every track while connecting the material with loose themes of womanhood, shame, and revenge...
Detroit trio Shadow Show was formed by longtime friends and bandmates, bringing a Beatles-like melodic sensibility to energetic garage pop songs. The group cultivated an air of mystery and danger with the mod-tinged rock songs
Shadow Show - Silhouettes / Glass Eye
After a few seconds of mysterious noise that sounds like distant waves crashing, Silhouettes, the debut album from Detroit trio Shadow Show, begins with a bassline a few notes removed from "Taxman" and a kaleidoscopic explosion of tremolo guitars and mod pop vocal harmonies. It's a strong start to an album that channels several different generations of both British pop and Detroit rock without ever directly mimicking any specific influences... The slide guitar riffing of "Glass Eye" offers a far more psychedelic reading of Detroit's ongoing fixation with the blues. Shadow Show's songs call on familiar elements -- layered vocal harmonies, the occasional driving punky bassline, melodies laced with garage rock attitude -- but song structures take unexpected turns. Rarely moving from verse to chorus and back, Shadow Show instead maps out strange navigations for their songs...The distant perspectives and strange sonic shifts of Silhouettes keep both the band and listeners actively engaged, leaving the album with the feeling that you've just wandered all night through some weird dream.
Post Animal - Forward Motion Godyssey / Post Animal
When Chicago's Post Animal made their full-length debut in 2018, it was with an eclectic set of hard-rockin' riffs, tight prog-inspired runs, wistful indie pop refrains... That debut, When I Think of You in a Castle, was produced by the band, and they keep things in-house for the follow-up, Forward Motion Godyssey. It was produced by bassist and founding member Dalton Allison with help from Castle co-mixer Adam Thein... If there's anything surprising about the remaining five-piece's second outing, it's that instead of homing in on a sound, they return with more of their oddball, freewheeling mix of styles ranging from classic metal, prog, and psych-rock to a seemingly contrarian indie soft rock... All told, Forward Motion Godyssey isn't quite as much fun as Post Animal's debut, but they still deliver that characteristic warmth as well as uncommonly sharp hooks, fills, and theatrics of a nature that should delight air guitarists and drummers everywhere.
Bambara are a Brooklyn-based band who play harsh, punishing post-punk with a distinct Western Gothic bent. Their songs combine walloping drums and dark, twangy guitar riffs with unsettling noise loops and howled, ranting vocals that examine the seedy side of life.
Bambara's second release on Wharf Cat Records isn't a radical departure from the first, 2018's Shadow on Everything, but it is most certainly a refinement. Active for over a decade, the Brooklyn-based trio's sound has evolved from shadowy noise rock to a much more focused, direct sort of gothic post-punk, foregrounding Reid Bateh's bitter, brutal lyrics about seedy characters who constantly seem to be one wrong move away from a horrible, unforgiving tragedy. Stray is the band's longest album to date, at 43 minutes, but it actually feels more concise...
Puss N Boots - Sister / Sister
Puss N Boots—the charming trio featuring Norah Jones, Sasha Dobson, and Catherine Popper—are slated to release their second full-length album. Sister is a collection of originals written by the band members collectively and individually, mixed with loving covers of songs...
Habibi - Anywhere But Here / Come My Habibi
Brooklyn's Habibi brought an explosive and celebratory fun to their self-titled 2014 debut. That brief collection was overflowing with bubblegum melodies, upbeat pop, and the kind of giddy excitement that bands only revel in during their earliest stages. Six years later, sophomore album Anywhere But Here retains some of that excitement, but sees the band expanding into moodier expression, more complex songwriting, and an expanded instrumentation that includes occasional Middle Eastern touches.--
Nathaniel Rateliff - And It's Still Alright / What a Drag
...Two raucous albums, thousands of road miles, and one divorce later, he's back to solo work on the ruminative 2020 set, And It's Still Alright. Already reeling from the disintegration of his relationship, the sudden death of Swift caused Rateliff to take a few steps back from the chaos of the previous few years and reexamine his whereabouts. Both a poignant tribute to his friend and former collaborator and a weary meditation on love and death, And It's Still Alright cuts a curious balance between tender introspection and a playful sense of confidence he's carried over from the Night Sweats era...
Rejoicer - Spiritual Sleaze / Song for the Spirit Flights
Yuvi Havkin's second Stones Throw full-length maintains the dreamy feel of his previous releases, but it seems far more focused, even as the producer's scope has clearly expanded. He titled it Spiritual Sleaze as the album is highly informed by his yoga and meditation practices, yet it's "dirty and bouncy" compared to his past work. While there's nothing ribald about the release, the grooves are considerably firmer this time around, and it doesn't always feel like the tracks could just slip away or dissolve at any moment. While Rejoicer's music always resists categorization, encompassing jazz, funk, ambient, and psychedelia, Spiritual Sleaze feels closer to R&B than hip-hop, particularly due to the presence of guest vocalists on several tracks. KerenDun's gentle flow complements the bubbly thump of "Song for the Spirit Flights"...
Katie Gately - Loom / Waltz
Loom wasn't the album Katie Gately planned to make -- it was the album she had to make. When her mother was diagnosed with a quick-moving and terminal form of cancer, Gately returned to Brooklyn to care for her, setting aside another album's worth of music to pour her grief and anger into the tracks that became her second full-length. Instead of writing songs that tell listeners about her loss, Gately uses all of her brilliance as a sound designer to engulf them in the experience. She knows exactly how to manipulate sounds -- earthquakes, rattling pill bottles, her own voice -- to embody grief's physicality as well as its emotional impact. In the process, she generates a visceral reaction that resonates on an almost cellular level. On "Waltz," Gately pays homage to "Take This Waltz" by Leonard Cohen (her mother's favorite artist) by distorting its one-two-three beat into a heavy, sickening lurch...
The Heliocentrics, The Men, The Third Mind, Le Butcherettes, Shadow Show, Post Animal, Bambara, Puss N Boots, Habibi, Nathaniel Rateliff, Rejoicer, Katie Gately
