On Soul Chateau, Dimples’ often defines the experience of looking at natural phenomenons. The songs dip listeners into a blue pool of vibration, guitar twangs and a creeping beat. Where “the night is young and the road bends,” Dimples’ psychedelic obscure-rock compositions give dusty and warbling landscapes.
Luke Csehak, writer, singer, instrumentalist, and producer of the album Budget Alchemy and the band The Lentils, seems to be having a crisis on the usefulness of language. His fondness for words and his troubles with them (“the words fail every time”) are articulated clearly and strangely throughout the album, proving his point.
Talk Soon, Hemlock’s latest self-released album, was recorded in Astoria, Oregon, where Chauffe was living during one year of the pandemic. This work differs from her other projects in its production, collaboration, and fullness. Throughout the seventeen tracks, Chauffe braids in windy field recordings and features a selection of voicemails.
Jason Albertini of Helvetia used the early-pandemic energy of loneliness and dread to habitually create one song a day, when he wasn’t homeschooling his daughter. Albertini’s resulting collection of distorted experimental rock songs, Sudden Hex, quietly came out through a Joyful Noise project, the Gray Area Cassette Series.
The band claims many influences from the 1960s and 70s, such as Alice Coltrane and Art Ensemble of Chicago, and most listeners can detect echoes of Stereolab and Broadcast. However much Vanishing Twin honors the past, Ookii Gekkou swirls these genres into something else ever-changing, as we would hope music in the future would.
Two feels as exciting as a live music experience, full of intricate surprises and clashing dynamics in their genre of experimental rock. They utilize the constraints of long-distance art-making to create multi-layered unique sounds, weaving different ideas into melodies and patterns that often feel like entering different colorful rooms of the same colorful house.
