041 ALTER.NATION: weekly favtraX 15-06-2019

ALTER.NATION #41

Stef Chura, Palehound, Knife Wife, The Mattson 2, French Vanilla, Brandt Brauer Frick, Dumb, Naytronix, Bat For Lashes, Joan Shelley, Wear Your Wounds, Sleater-Kinney

weekly favtraX 

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ALTER.NATION #41 on DEEZER

Michigan-based indie singer/songwriter with a distinctive fingerpicked guitar style and twangy voice. 
Stef Chura - Sweet Sweet Midnight from Midnight
... the follow-up, Midnight, finds Chura working with another champion of intense guitar song, Car Seat Headrest's Will Toledo, who both produced and performs on the album. More assertive on average but stylistically similar enough to the debut to hearten fans (it returns drummer Ryan Clancy), Midnight offers a mix of fiery, hooky rock ditties and longer, sometimes episodic ruminative rants...

With a sound rooted in '90s D.I.Y. indie rock and grungey low-key folk, Palehound emerged in the mid-2010s as the project of Boston-based singer/songwriter Ellen Kempner
Palehound - Stick N Poke from Black Friday
Ellen Kempner continues to engage more deeply with themes of love and compassion on Black Friday, the third long-player from her Boston-based combo Palehound. Originally launched as a solo bedroom project back in 2013, she spent a few years making Palehound into a sturdy indie rock trio, though it's still her voice and vision that comprise the heart and soul of each release. Without introducing any dramatic changes to her approach, Black Friday continues to lean toward Kempner's more contemplative side, eschewing some of the rowdier fuzz-pop tendencies of earlier releases...

Knife Wife - Dogs
Knife Wife are a trio from DC ...they’re sharing “Dogs,” the closing track from their first EP. It’s a queasy weave of sighing melodies, stacked on top of each other and building off the surrealistic refrain “all the little dogs in the fridge.” The band cuts through it with a thick guitar line, which twists into a feverish knot.

Expansive instrumental duo featuring guitarist Jared Mattson and his brother, drummer Jonathan Mattson. 
The Mattson 2 - Naima's Dream from Paradise
...Paradise is a much more laid-back and pop-oriented production. Cuts like the opening "Naima's Daughter" and "Moonlight Motel" are sparkling groovers built around Jared's bright-toned arpeggio's and lyrical guitar leads, all of which bring to mind a vintage late '60s/early '70s vibe that falls somewhere in between George Benson and the hippie vocal group Free Design...

Angular yet danceable art punk band from Los Angeles. Taking inspiration from jagged post-punk and subversive performing arts, Los Angeles band French Vanilla brought energy and guile to their saxophone-heavy art punk.
French Vanilla - Move Along, Move Ahead from How Am I Not Myself?
Los Angeles art punk quartet French Vanilla wrapped sociopolitical threads in high-impact dance grooves on their 2017 self-titled debut. With sophomore album How Am I Not Myself?, they raise the bar on both songcraft and production, sharpening their sound on ten tracks rife with tension, energy, and unhinged fun... Expanded production highlights the band's razor-sharp playing and smart reworking of the more exciting and lively side of post-punk. Never drab, How Am I Not Myself? sounds like a party even when railing against outdated societal norms or describing a panic attack.

Berlin-based trio who, like the Moritz von Oswald Trio, play a form of lean techno that is primarily acoustic. The Berlin-based Brandt Brauer Frick make what they call "emotional body music," or lean techno with supple and primarily acoustic instrumentation...
Brandt Brauer Frick - Fuel from Echo
The title of the fifth studio album from instrumentalists and producers Daniel Brandt, Jan Brauer, and Paul Frick refers to the trio's return to their original approach a decade earlier, when their objective was to make "techno without the technology" while applying Frick's background in modern composition.

Sharp, arty, yet unpretentious Vancouver punk band whose music belies their name. 
Dumb - Some Big Motor Dream from Club Nites
Vancouver-based punk band Dumb established there was a large amount of irony in their name when they released their first album for Mint Records, Seeing Green, in 2018, and that hasn't changed a bit on the follow-up, 2019's Club Nites. Clever, energetic, overstimulated, and amiably intense, Club Nites suggests Dumb are evolving into the 21st century version of the Embarrassment, a band who bent punk orthodoxy to their own wiry purposes...

Alias of tUnE-yArDs bassist Nate Brenner, who assembles sundry experimental electronic pop. 
Naytronix - Following a Pattern from Air
The follow-up to 2015's Mister Divine, Air is the third album from Naytronix, the solo project of tUnE-yArDs bassist Nate Brenner. Though largely the effort of Brenner alone, its dense textures include contributions from guests such as tUnE-yArDs' Merrill Garbus and Mwahaha's Ross Peacock, both of whom co-produced some of the album. Leaning into darker, bolder sounds, it slides along the spectrum from whimsical, experimental electro-pop toward nightclub-ready synth pop without fully arriving at the latter...

Acclaimed British/Pakastani singer/songwriter with influences that range from Steve Reich to Siouxsie Sioux. 
Bat For Lashes - Kids In The Dark
This Fall, Natasha Khan will release Lost Girls, her fifth studio album as Bat For Lashes. It’ll be her first new material since her last full-length, 2016’s The Bride. As promised today we hear the lead single, the gleaming synth-pop ballad “Kids In The Dark.”... “If her last album, The Bride, was melancholy and mournful, a tone poem of loss and regret, Lost Girls is her mischievous younger sister, widescreen in scope and bursting with Technicolour intensity,” the press release reads. “It’s an album for driving in the dark; holding hands at sunset; jumping off bridges with vampires; riding your bike across the moon.”

Kentucky-based singer/songwriter mixing both '60s folk and old-time country. 
Joan Shelley - Coming Down For You
(Feat. Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Nathan Salsburg, & James Elkington)
...Shelley has announced a fall tour and shared “Coming Down For You,” her first original song in over two years. She travelled to Reykjavik, Iceland to record it with a whole host of kindred spirits from the folk music scene — Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Nathan Salsburg, and James Elkington — and its cover art features a photograph of her mother.
The song “came to me while I was in motion and I couldn’t write it down,” Shelley says. “I was thinking of the rhythm of animals, of work, and of travel; the rhythm of someone riding into chaos to bring a loved one back out again.”

Originally founded as a solo project of Converge founder Jacob Bannon. The live band has grown to include Mike McKenzie (Stomach Earth, The Red Chord, Unraveller), Adam McGrath (Cave In, Nomad Stones, 27, Zozobra), Sean Martin (Twitching Tongues, Hatebreed), and Chris Maggio (Sleigh Bells, Trap Them, Coliseum).
Wear Your Wounds - Shrinking Violet
A couple of years ago, Jacob Bannon went solo. Bannon — longtime frontman of Boston metalcore greats Converge and founder of the consistently excellent heavy-music label Deathwish, Inc. — started up a solo side project called Wear Your Wounds... Wear Your Wounds have shared a surging, colossal rocker called “Shrinking Violet.” The new song has nothing to do with hardcore and almost nothing to do with metal. Instead, it’s a grand and majestic rock song, one with elements of goth and prog and grunge all floating through it. Bannon and his bandmates build the song slowly over nearly six minutes, starting with a quavering churn and building it into a raging inferno.

Arguably the most important punk band of the 1990s and 2000s, with feminist songwriting matched by taut melodicism and jaw-dropping sonic complexity. 
Sleater-Kinney - The Future Is Here
Sleater-Kinney released their last album, No Cities To Love, back in 2015. Soon, the legendary trio will return with a new St. Vincent-produced LP called The Center Won’t Hold. It will be out 8/16 via Mom + Pop Records, marking a move from Sleater-Kinney’s old home at Sub Pop.
They’ve already shared the forthcoming album’s lead single, “Hurry On Home.” That song ranked #1 on our 5 Best Songs Of The Week list a few weeks ago, and today, we hear the follow-up track, “The Future Is Here.”

Stef Chura, Palehound, Knife Wife, The Mattson 2, French Vanilla, Brandt Brauer Frick, Dumb, Naytronix, Bat For Lashes, Joan Shelley, Wear Your Wounds, Sleater-Kinney

023 ALTER.NATiON: weekly favtraX 02-03-2019

ALTER.NATiON
Big Thief, Brutus, Chasms, Control Top, Feels, Hatchie, Helado Negro, Julian Lage, Le SuperHomard, Lily & Madeleine, Martin Frawley, Palehound, R. Stevie Moore

Control Top photo by Vince Guglielmo @vincegphoto

weekly favtraX
02-03-2019

Control Top - Chain Reaction
The new track they’re sharing from it today, “Chain Reaction,” is all fiery rage and crawling fury, bashing drums cut through with peeling guitars. “No one likes to take the blame/ In the end, we’re all the same,” Carter screams. “Light the wick, pull the trigger/ What started small is getting bigger.”
“The song takes place in the middle of an argument,” Carter explains in a press release. “Vitriol is flying and emotions are running high. With our culture’s growing appetite for anger and conflict, a petty disagreement can easily escalate into a full-out shouting match.”

R. Stevie Moore -  Too Old (To Fall in Love) from Afterlife
R. Stevie Moore is a pioneer of home recording, a do-it-yourself musical aesthetic that took root and blossomed in the 1970s. RSM was an early adopter — since 1968 he's cranked out hundreds of album-length recordings as a growing cult discovered him over the decades. He's a pop craftsman who never feared cheap technology. In the 2000s his catalog exploded across the internet, and while he remains a cultural outlier, future generations will discover him as well. Every once in a while Stevie enters a pro recording studio and produces tracks with better fidelity. Afterlife is RSM's A-game collection. Some recent songs, some reimagined nuggets, all polished to pop perfection.

Lily & Madeleine - Analog Love from Canterbury Girls
Over the course of three albums with slightly different production philosophies, singing and songwriting sisters Lily & Madeleine have established a distinctive style that's rooted in patient, thoughtful melodies and elegant harmonies. That distinctiveness has transcended shifts from quiet acoustic arrangements to more expansive, part-electronic accompaniment, and it does so again on their fourth album...

Martin Frawley - What's on Your Mind from Undone at 31
Australian singer and guitarist Martin Frawley first broke onto the global indie radar as one of the co-frontpeople of Melbourne jangle pop quartet Twerps. The band's melodic and slightly ramshackle Flying Nun-inspired indie pop won over both fans and critics, leading to international tours and a 2015 sophomore LP released by established American imprint Merge Records. When the romantic side of Frawley's creative partnership with Twerps bandmate Julia McFarlane hit the rocks, their ensuing breakup also ended the band. On Undone at 31, Frawley's first outing as a solo artist, he sorts through the wreckage and manages to spin his personal upheaval into a rather charming collection of low-key pop gems. With the help of producer Stewart Bronaugh (Angel Olsen, Lionlimb), he constructs an appealingly minimalist home around 12 searching missives that play out the various stages of heartbreak, melancholia, and acceptance...

Feels - Post Earth from Post Earth
If you're an indie rock band and you want to play up the garage punk influences in your music, you would think having Ty Segall as producer would be the way to go. But a listen to 2019's Post Earth, the second album from Feels, suggests maybe the formula is more complicated than that. Segall produced Feels' self-titled 2016 debut album, which was a likable bit of pop-leaning indie rock with a seriously garage-centric undertow. But Tim Green was in the producer's chair for Post Earth, and this music sounds sharper, tighter, and distinctly punkier than the debut, with the garage moves more natural and the guitar crosstalk more expressive in round two...

Chasms - Deep Love Deep Pain from The Mirage
Just a couple of months after Chasms' Jess Labrador and Shannon Madden released their accomplished debut album, On the Legs of Love Purified, the unthinkable happened: On the night of December 2, 2016, a fire swept through the underground warehouse venue Ghost Ship that took a huge artistic and personal toll on the Bay Area indie music scene. Among the fire's 36 victims were Chasms' close friend and frequent collaborator Cash Askew of Them Are Us Too and Madden's brother Griffin, who was just 23. Chasms dealt with their loss the only way they could -- through their music. They played dates just days after the tragedy, and ultimately moved to Los Angeles for a fresh start to their music and lives. This sense of transformation permeates The Mirage.

Palehound - Killer
Musically, “Killer” is suggestive, quietly cinematic; it sounds like the smoke drifting upwards as a film character who’s seen some shit takes a drag mid-monologue. Kempner, too, sounds like she’s seen some shit here. “I wanna be the one who kills the man who hurt you, darling,” she sings on the chorus, her voice full of weight and curling itself around the word “darling” as if to conjure the violent cowboy mythology to which the song’s vaguely Western aesthetic and revenge narrative nod. In the end, we never get the explosion, that moment of vicious justice. Loose guitar lines tumble along, searching. And in a way all of this is more satisfying than volcanic distortion or cathartic screams. Instead, “Killer” lingers in the air, a whisper of furious resolve.

Julian Lage - Love Hurts from Love Hurts
Love Hurts marks guitarist Julian Lage's third trio date for Mack Avenue. The previous two, Arclight (2016) and Modern Lore (2018), were with bassist Scott Colley and drummer/vibraphonist Kenny Wollesen. The Love Hurts sessions were inspired by some live dates where Lage and bassist Jorge Roeder (who worked with Lage on 2009's Sounding Point) were joined by Bad Plus drummer Dave King. The trio recorded at the Loft (Wilco's recording studio in Chicago). Lage set down his trademark Telecaster for this date and picked up Jeff Tweedy's Gretsch Duo Jet instead. Cut live from the floor in mostly first takes, these ten tracks -- produced by Lage -- were completed in a day and a half.

Hatchie - Without A Blush
Hariette Pillbeam crafts hook-heavy, retro-tinged dream-pop as Hatchie. The Brisbane singer-songwriter debuted her project last year with one of the best EPs of 2018, Sugar & Spice. Its quick, sparkling tracklist gave us a few scenes from Hatchie’s cinematic universe — tender and nostalgic, fit for a ‘90s romcom soundtrack. “Without A Blush,” the lead single from her forthcoming debut album, takes us deeper as Pillbeam mourns the end of a relationship.
The song conjures a montage of memories, or a flashback to a meet cute. The synth tones sound borrowed and remixed from an ’80s high school slow dance song. The guitars are enveloped in a cloud of reverb, fading into her regretful sighs: “If I could kiss you one more time / Would it make everything alright? / Or would it just make me a liar? / I didn’t wanna end tonight, the dream.”

Big Thief  - UFOF
The alien abduction that happens in the lyrics of Big Thief’s new song “UFOF” is nearly as strange and beautiful as the one that happens in the music... From the start, Big Thief have excelled at finding new lenses for familiar scenes, and “UFOF” extends their scope to science fiction. The sweep of fingerpicked acoustic guitars and airtight rhythm forms a new type of groove for the band—their version, maybe, of an arpeggiated synth and a drum loop. “I imagine you taking me out of here,” Adrianne Lenker sings, gazing heavenward as the music tumbles in anticipation. And when nothing comes to save her, she has no choice but to do it herself.

Helado Negro - Running
Roberto Carlos Lange’s music as Helado Negro thrives on meeting listeners halfway wherever they may be in life. “Running,” the latest from Lange’s forthcoming sixth album, This Is How You Smile, fits snugly within that calm and comforting mold... “Running” takes on a circular shape, levitating on its refrains and instrumental cues. But Lange’s verses here are spiked with an illusory, personal sense of nostalgia: “I feel you/In my mind/All the time,” he sings placidly, before admitting, “’Cause I see you/In my hands/Every day/You got me running...” The song abides by Lange’s mission of crafting music that not only addresses intimacy frankly in lyrics but also sounds intimate, especially in its pop-minded yet free-floating structure and cooed melodies. Limned with vibraphone and gently plucked guitar, “Running” is a balmy, nourishing listen, inviting everyone to join step with its easy gait toward a better tomorrow.

Brutus - Cemetery
...“Cemetery” is the most exciting, ferocious, kinetic track on an album that consistently goes to 11 in categories like “Excitment,” “Ferocity,” and “Kinetic Energy.” “Cemetery” opens with a blistering burst of neck-snapping sludge — a bedrock provided by Brutus’ godlike rhythm section of drummer/singer Stefanie Mannaerts and bassist Peter Mulders — over which guitarist Stijn Vanhoegaerden stunts as if he were in Alcest or Explosions In The Sky, and Mannaerts snarls, howls, and roars as if she were a tornado. The track transforms, though, just after the two-minute mark. It transcends. All the furious, jagged metallic clamor is broken down and somehow rebuilt as a jet engine. The thing doesn’t just roar; it takes flight. Climbing, climbing … and then, as the piece heads into its final half-minute, it fires full-blast and jumps into goddamn orbit. This is the apex.

Big Thief, Brutus, Chasms, Control Top, Feels, Hatchie, Helado Negro, Julian Lage, Le SuperHomard, Lily & Madeleine, Martin Frawley, Palehound, R. Stevie Moore