A good drone knows you, as you know a good drone. Swelling with tides of undulating sound over a persistent tonal hum, it brings you in closer time, maybe even chromatic lockstep, with your breath cycles, your heartbeat, the world around you. A good drone offers its own narratives by tying its rhythms and clusters…
Review: King Buzzo – “Gift of Sacrifice”
Ipecac Recordings advanced two singles off King Buzzo’s much-anticipated second solo LP, Gift of Sacrifice: “I’m Glad I Could Help Out” and “Science in Modern America”. They’re good, they’re good. But why the label didn’t sneak a peak, though, at “Housing, Luxury, Energy”, arguably the record’s best track, is beyond me. The six-minute-long song, the introduction to the collection…
Review: Jim O’Rourke – “Shutting Down Here”
Jim O’Rourke fired off “Cede” 20- or 25-odd years ago as a salvo in the battles within his alien landscape of a musical mind. Shutting Down Here, then, is a punctuation. The new composition, out 14 August, was put to tape in sessions spanning decades at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, or GRM, in Paris –…
Review: Merce Lemon – “Moonth”
There’s a clear line between Moonth, the new LP from Pittsburgh singer-songwriter Merce Lemon, and Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville, which hit streets and stereos more than a generation ago. Both records are documents of strong-willed women coming to terms with themselves and their desires in the musical and romantic landscapes that surround and sometimes seek to…
Review: Daniel Donato – “A Young Man’s Country”
Country guitar-slinger Daniel Donato has a success story that’s writ in big, block letters, locked in position and ready for mass consumption. A guitarist since he was 12, Donato in his early teens started busking on Nashville’s Lower Broadway, playing sometimes for up to eight hours each day. His persistence eventually led to a guest…
Profile: Stone Throwers (2020)
Here’s the set-up. The Pittsburgh-based soul musician known as Dr. D had just gone through a break-up a while back and was looking to get back out there. One night, when out on the town with a young woman, he got a text from his ex-girlfriend and, frustrated, closed his tab and ended the date,…
Review: TRVSS – “New Distances”
Looking for noise-rock to cut through the film of dusty ear-drums like a straight razor? Well, TRVSS has your number. The trio cuts through the bullshit with post-hardcore propulsion. Sophomore effort, New Distances, as understatements go, is tightly wound. How TRVSS sounds this in synch is confusing for a band with this short of a resume….
Profile: TRVSS (2020)
The new TRVSS song “Malaria” is as infectious as its title indicates. Of course, it falls seven songs into the trio’s second LP – “New Distances,” which the band is self-releasing July 31 – so the spell has already been cast. If you haven’t been converted by then, well, there’s just no hope for you….
Review: The Bobby Lees – “Skin Suit”
What’s the opposite of rigor mortis, that stiffening of the joints that immediately follows death? Well, whatever it is, that’s the best way to summarize the sensation of taking in the new LP from the Bobby Lees, a Woodstock, New York garage-rock quartet with sex, sweat, and lightning bolts of electricity surging through their collective…
Review: TJO – “Songs for Peacock”
Memory is an illusion, a construction both flimsy and fluctuating that you can’t see with your eyes, much less touch with your hands. We think, as individuals with our own concepts of what is real or true, that we have control of the construction, but more than anything, it exerts control over us. Memory regularly…