Despite how fantastic of a sales pitch it is, I can’t help but feel like I’m doing Panoptic Horror a disservice by describing it as “Hell Awaits era Slayer meets crust punk.” That feeling mostly comes down to the fact that, although they’re not trying to hide their influences, they’re definitely their own thing. The killer LP is a primo slab of ripping thrash with a death metal tinge, all the while borrowing the production, punk ethos and overdrive technique from a band like Sacrilege or Anti-Cimex. No matter who or what you hear in it, it’s the kind of sinister shit that conjures images of grotesque demons, airborne bricks, broken bones and/or searing flesh in the mind of the listener.
In other words, if Hell had a mosh pit, this would be the soundtrack. –Bloon
As the decade draws to a close, 2018 has proven to be one of the more interesting years from it. Looking at the metal genre as a collective, this year has seen an internal struggle with artistic innovation and corporate, algorithmic songwriting; futilely homogeneous and insipid mainstream metal releases versus the heavy lifting and sometimes groundbreaking works from the underground scenes – of which there has been a good handful…
I feel somewhat reticent talking about Yung Lean, let alone his latest, Poison Ivy. Whatever I write drips with ignorance, despite my love for the 22-minute project; and in some sense, that’s unavoidable. An air of mystique has always seemed to surround the Swedish rapper – as though those uninitiated were being poked at, and even the most meaningful of lyrics were being delivered with a grin and a wink. That might be the point, though: Jonatan Leandoer’s mainstream success seems neither obvious nor miraculous. Likewise, the “point” is one unattainable. Or rather, an “understanding” is useless – condescending and maybe even a little counter-intuitive. Yung Lean makes music – and that music is good – and Poison Ivy is good – and whatever meaning there is to be gleaned is meaning to be gleaned from the music itself. From the dark and distorted overtones of the mixtape’s more obvious, hook-driven choruses, and the incoherence of its central figure. I think cultural aesthetic is helpful in hooking one into a scene and its artists; but often – as is the case with Poison Ivy – the music itself speaks volumes. And Poison Ivy speaks in tongues. –BlushfulHippocrene
ITEM, a Cleveland-based indie rock group, came into my life as a surprise discovery by a friend. I was immediately entranced by the sleepy absurdity of Sad Light, which ends up juxtaposing heavily with its most poignant moments — tales of environmental destruction and emotional dysfunction meeting with non-sequiturs and childlike playfulness. I spoke to Dylan Glover, the band’s vocalist and synth player, about the themes and basis of Sad Light, his take on composition, and the importance of humour in ITEM’s music.
This transcript has been condensed and edited.
It seems like there is a lot of absurdity, humour, and medical references in the lyrics. How did you come to settle on these particular themes for Sad Light?
I’m wondering how to even begin answering that, because one thing begets another thing begets another thing. How it began — I’m trying to think what the first song I wrote was on the record. Lyrically, I want to say it was “Horse Pill”, which is inherently medical — it is related to pharmaceutical drugs and my problem with them — so that opened the floodgates for the rest of the album to have a medicinal, medical theme; there’s a lot of mention of medical environments, hospitals. It was because that laid the groundwork for all of those themes that it just kept expanding on those basic ideas. And absurdist humour is just me coming out in full form — I feel like if I didn’t respect…
My attention first turned towards Basalte, a black metal band based in Montréal, when I heard their 2018 sophomore release, Vertige [lit. “vertigo”]. It’s at once desolate, bleak, towering, and yet intensely heartfelt at its most elegant moments; listen closely and the nuances will surely envelop you. I spoke to the band’s drummer, L, to learn more about the band and their compositions; we also discussed band optics, songwriting processes, and the state of black metal. In regards to Vertige, L was particularly proud of how its technical aspects came together: the album did not involve digital delay or reverb, and a conscious choice was made to avoid studios in lieu of specific, unconventional places that would provide the exact acoustics desired.
*This interview has been edited and condensed.
Claire: First, I wanted to know about how your band chooses to present itself, especially in the age of social media and constant exposure. Do you find anonymity to be more useful than ever, in a social media-saturated environment?
L: There are many answers to this question. The first one is that I personally don’t really like associating faces too much with the music I listen to, and the fact that metal is one of the genres where bands tend to not put their image too much upfront… well, that’s not true of all metal, but for example, Deathspell Omega — or…
A Conversation With:
Jordan C. Weinstock of
american poetry club
There are few bands I can claim to have discovered at the moment of their inception — or, at least, upon their first release. Jordan C. Weinstock’s american poetry club (apc) is one of them, however, and glad to be here, etcetera is a project that enamoured me on first listen. I’ve user Conmaniac to thank for that, as well as for this chance to interview Jordan. The fact that We Are Beautiful, Even When We Are Broken! is apc’s second full-length within the span of a year is no detriment to my interest either. With We Are Beautiful…, apc have crafted a seamless opus, and an immaculate piece of emo music. I sat down with Jordan to speak with him about it. —BlushfulHippocrene
Blush: So, to start: care to explain for our readers, who – or what – is american poetry club?
Jordan: [a]merican poetry club (apc) started out as just me, with a little help here-and-there from a few pals. It was mostly a side project to my old band The Chair Enthusiasts. I was having a tough time as my mom went through chemotherapy, and writing songs was an active coping method of mine, so those first songs were just stabs at helping myself feel better. I felt they didn’t quite fit the Chair Enthusiasts vibe, and I really like coming up with band names [laughs] so I decided to make them into…
Allegory and Self was a watershed moment in Psychic TV’s timeline (as much as a band that morphs, dissembles and fledges chronically can cultivate a cogent turning point). It had taken everything that came before them, everything that was happening around them and threw in a few instants of prescience, and unceremoniously flung it forth. Folk, psych, new-wave, art punk, industrial squeals, noise, minimalism, ambient and a dozen of other sub-sub-genres came together in decidedly ungraceful fashion to make something vilely pretty. “Thee Dweller”, better than any other track on the LP stands for it all – difficult and punishing, it stomps on, amid howls, muttered mantras, noisy outbursts and a synthetic backdrop. A good song to open a night of no sleep.
Bristol post-punk antiheroes The Pop Group recorded their dub-punk freakouts to mixed acclaim. I don’t know if they understood at the time that they were making one of the most important albums of its time. Dance music for the infirm, “Thief of Fire” permeates the cranium the way sickness does – against a tide of instinct and protection, to forge something eerier and better.
When Pete Doherty sang about Albion as some dreamy ultra-tolerant place where the subversive felt normal, I doubt many fans knew that he’d pilfered the concept from Ted Milton – poet, marionette despot and rotten saxophonist. Blurt, his art rock outfit, were driven by a rough-edged garage band propping up Milton’s manic recitals and saxophone shrieks.…
Hasaan Ibn Ali (born William Henry Langford Jr.) had played with every bop heavy throughout his life, from young impresarios like Clifford Brown all the way down to Miles Davis at his creative peak. He’d lead his own ensembles, figured as a key aspect in several iconic live sessions, and his layered, intricate and highly pliant playing style has long since been considered to be the main inspiration behind Coltrane’s sheets of sounds recording approach. The sole studio recording the legendary pianist has ever figured on however was a collaborative session with the Max Roach Quintet. The opening piece off the album is a thrilling show of his prowess on the keys, loose and unafraid to go into odd corners and the perfect way to kick off the first installment of this little jukebox.
Swedish new-wavers with a propensity to slide into prolonged dub dirges, Commando M. Pigg merged post-punk, krautrock and deep dark dense bass into the sort of extended thickly-atmospheric dance numbers that immediately start pulsing off in your temples when you take molly in a dimly-lit pub.
Sexily melancholic, this patient slow dance tune by The Raincoats is packed with so many brilliant little touches (trumpet squeaks, throaty ululating, penny whistles, Caribbean percussion). It all comes together into a busy ecosystem that sways you into oblivion. Available on Rough Trade re-issues of Moving, the band’s third full-length.
The powers of capitalism that be forced my hand when Yelderbert’s neon shine burst onto my Facebook feed. I seldom click on advertising campaigns, but I’m pretty happy I did because this Melbourne producer has been working away at some rather unique flavours of experimental pop in a way that’s both invigorating and wonderfully homely. And just as well; while getting lost in Canada recently, I reached out to Yelderbert to breathe some Aussie air and learn about the man behind the button pushing. —ramon.
Ramon: Kicking things off, Yelderbert. Dope name. Give me the what, why, who, when, and how when it comes to your origin story.
Yelderbert: Well, to be honest, it means absolutely nothing, and that’s more or less the point. I don’t want to attempt to be trendy. I’m also aware that, as a white Australian, I’m fairly devoid of rich cultural context, so I wanted something that didn’t mean anything. Yelderbert was just a word I came up with one time and it means nothing. It doesn’t really sound close to anything else; there wasn’t even anything on Google when I searched it. And while it’s pretty clunky, I just thought, “That’s my word, it came organically out of me, and it’s not trying to be anything except itself,” which is fairly analogous to the way I make music.
Very interesting. That brings up a few different pathways, but let’s start from the top. You brought up your own cultural…
Based in Vancouver, B.C., Anchoress are a band who have formulated a unique sound rooted in melodic hardcore and post-hardcore. If I were to describe their distinguishing features, it’d be their reflectiveness and unmatched ability to warm the heart – there’s a perfect combination of fighting spirit and wit going on. Their most recent record, a full-length album called Anchoress is Ruining My Life, was released in 2016 and can be found free on Bandcamp; they also have other albums and singles available on the platform. I talked to Anchoress; singer, Rob Hoover, about a variety of topics, ranging from the band’s ethos to to challenges that they face as a modern-day independent band. —Claire
Claire: Your last album, Anchoress is Ruining My Life, showed a marked stylistic shift: it’s less abrasive, more controlled, than prior releases. For instance, T.E.P.F.K.A.L., released just 5 months before, is noticeably more fiery. How would you describe the process that led to the distinct style of Anchoress is Ruining My Life?
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. It was very intentional on our part that we wanted something a lot more precise when we were working on this record. Our previous record Crime & Compass was written and recorded very quickly to fit into a timetable with a tour we had planned, and as a result it felt kind of hectic and we made some choices for expedience sake that we felt made parts of that album suffer.
By 1975 in New York City, the first wave of punk had floated to the top of the underground, seeping into pop culture and making small doomed stars of its first insurgents. CBGB in the East Village had become a bastion of young iconoclasts re-shaping rock music into something decidedly more septic. Both the New York Dolls and Detroit’s Iggy Pop (fresh off the Stooges imploding) had become havoc-prone headliners through the city’s club circuit. And Lou Reed and Patti Smith had been flung onto the ambo as gutter sibyls, performance visionaries who seemed to know something most didn’t. Malcom McLaren had taken the bug across the pond and birthed the Sex Pistols and the fever caught. It was all happening, and new eager bands were springing up like lice. By ’77, in the midst of that mass push to forge froth-mouthed, frenetic rock n’ roll, a small seed of a meta-revolt was brewing inside punk’s inherently meat-headed tendencies. Stray architects who were looking to do away with glam-blam flash and the charming lobotomy of Ramones, to make music that was as agile as it was intellectual, all the while avoiding sounding sterile and over-meticulous, a pratfall that occasionally haunted both Television and Talking Heads. These were young kids who loved both the stylish hollowness of the French New Wave and the undiluted freedom that punk was crawling with before its first commercial take-over. Artists like Richard Hell, David Thomas, Lizzy Mercier Descloux and the like, were chasing the…
Thousands upon thousands of albums, EPs, mixtapes, compilations, and songs are released weekly. You might not be aware of the existence of 99% of those releases, but they’re there. So when each song released to the public is simply a drop in a pool that dwarfs even the Pacific Ocean, it can be hard to navigate the current music scene: it’s always moving and impossible to keep up with its speed. That’s where Share Some Singles comes into the picture. This series was formed to highlight songs released in 2017 that might not have been discovered by other listeners otherwise. I, alongside other Sputnikmusic users, have pulled together dozens of singles released in the recent past that we felt needed to be heard by the world. Or at least the Sputnik reader base.
Artists are listed in alphabetical order with corresponding YouTube, Soundcloud, and/or Bandcamp links (click on the song title to open a new tab). A Spotify playlist is also embedded below if the singles are available through that service. Enjoy! –wtferrothorn
What do you know about beauty? Alex Cameron and Angel Olsen have a deep knowledge of it, that’s for sure. This is as tender and gorgeous as one could ever want a duet to be. In the short 4 minutes of runtime,…
September 2017 is a time of great change and uncertainty for me. Life-long friendships have dissolved, I’ve potentially been at the heart of intense pain for more than a few, and my own state of existence is being called into a flickering, wavering contention between worth and worthlessness. And, I suppose, most evidently out of this maelstrom of misjudgment and mistakes leaves the question that lingers at the edge of my mind every single night as I struggle to sleep: where will I live in three weeks’ time?
I have to keep myself living by a mantra that has defined the past few years of my life: “Take things one day at a time.”
This mantra often leaves the future in a constant blur that I reject the existence of, and while this blur helps shelter the fragility of anxiety that lures me into the oncoming traffic of sentience, it also allows me to make poor judgments and decisions — often in the heat of the moment — so as to not shatter the illusion that I have no idea what or where I’ll be one or three years from now.
In the aftermath of poor decisions, that illusion is usually shattered regardless, as the immediate nature and repercussions of my decisions don’t allow me to disregard thought beyond today. And when life begins to crumble over the poorly structured fail-safe I devise to keep myself going, I usually turn…
Thousands upon thousands of albums, EPs, mixtapes, compilations, and songs are released weekly. You might not be aware of the existence of 99% of those releases, but they’re there. So when each song released to the public is simply a drop in a pool that dwarfs even the Pacific Ocean, it can be hard to navigate the current music scene: it’s always moving and impossible to keep up with its speed. That’s where Share Some Singles comes into the picture. This series was formed to highlight songs released in 2017 that might not have been discovered by other listeners otherwise. I, alongside other Sputnikmusic users, have pulled together dozens of singles released in the recent past that we felt needed to be heard by the world. Or at least the Sputnik reader base.
Artists are listed in alphabetical order with corresponding YouTube, Soundcloud, and/or Bandcamp links. A Spotify playlist is also embedded below if the singles are available through that service. Enjoy! –wtferrothorn
ABRONCA – “Chegando De Assalto”
When thinking about abrasive and aggressive hip-hop, one usually imagines some ’90s gangstas, innit? Well, there is a trio of Brazilian ladies that would like to flip you off first, but then also convince you they are just as capable of delivering raw, in your face hip-hop harshness. –UniqueUniverse
Thousands upon thousands of albums, EPs, mixtapes, compilations, and songs are released weekly. You might not be aware of the existence of 99% of those releases, but they’re there. So when each song released to the public is simply a drop in a pool that dwarfs even the Pacific Ocean, it can be hard to navigate the current music scene: it’s always moving and impossible to keep up with its speed. That’s where Share Some Singles comes into the picture. This series was formed to highlight songs released in 2017 that might not have been discovered by other listeners otherwise. I, alongside other Sputnikmusic users, have pulled together dozens of singles released in the recent past that we felt needed to be heard by the world. Or at least the Sputnik reader base.
Artists are listed in alphabetical order with corresponding YouTube, Soundcloud, and/or Bandcamp links. A Spotify playlist is also embedded below if the singles are available through that service. Enjoy! –wtferrothorn
Algiers – “The Underside of Power”
On their self-titled debut, Algiers came through with a blend of genres that was a breath of fresh air, but definitely could have been improved upon with later releases. That’s exactly what happened here: Franklin James Fisher’s soulful vocals are as passionate as ever, and this time around, his vocal style meshes with the punk…
