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

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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

024 ALTER.NATiON: weekly favtraX 08-03-2019

ALTER.NATiON #024

The Stroppies, The Black Keys, Black Mountain, Royal Trux, Stef Chura, Stephen Malkmus, Facs, The Mountain Goats, Sebadoh, Bobby Long
 
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02-03-2019

Scrappy indie pop band from Australia made up of members of Dick Diver, Twerps, Blank Statements, and White Walls. 
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.

Intense Akron, Ohio blues-soaked duo that began by overwhelming indie rock critics and quickly moved to arena audiences.
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.

Vancouver indie band that combines doomy riffage with risky experimentation. 
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.”

Boundary-breaking underground rock project from guitarist Neil Hagerty and producer/singer Jennifer Herrema.

Royal Trux - Suburban Junky Lady from White Stuff
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.

Dylan Carlson-led project based in Seattle whose sporadic bursts of ambient metal wowed critics.
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.”

Michigan-based indie singer/songwriter with a distinctive fingerpicked guitar style and twangy voice. 
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.

The former Pavement frontman's solo career has a broader musical palette, evoking British folk, '70s prog, psychedelia, and blazing guitar rock. 
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.”

Dark, propulsive post-punk trio formed from the ashes of Chicago's Disappears. 
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.

The primary outlet for the melancholy wanderings of cryptic yet revered lo-fi singer/songwriter John Darnielle. 

The Mountain Goats - Cadaver Sniffing Dog
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.

The quintessential lo-fi band of the '90s, centered around the neurotic observational genius of depressive-obsessive Lou Barlow. 
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.

Songwriting has always been a soul-baring exercise for British singer-songwriter Bobby Long.  From the dark themes of his earliest work through to the thought-provoking subject matter he has traversed since then, his body of work is at its core captivating and emotionally raw. 
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.”

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