Flickering i is a strange and addicting album. Listening feels like watching as someone makes a thing piecemeal in front of you. Listening is like the feeling of being tailed by your own ghost. These metaphors for Flickering i may sound esoteric, but they’re reasonable descriptions after a few listens.
From concept to recording, woods calls Aethiopes “one of more symbiotic, feedback-loop processes of making an album that I probably ever had.” He’s right. woods and Preservation’s collaboration is symbiotic in a way that feels ordained; it’s impossible to imagine this album produced in any other way.
Springtime is considered a supergroup – and rightfully so. Each of these players is a pillar of their craft, a master at their instrument. Their Night Raver EP may only be three songs, but there’s a lot going on: two very disparate longform opuses and one seven-minute improvisation-adjacent rock song.
Throughout The Lurch, the band repeatedly pulls the proverbial rug out from the listener. The album is a thing in constant motion, always changing. Noise, thrash, speed, bonkers time-changes, The Lurch has it all. Contortionist riffs and sprinting rhythms double back on themselves like ascending switchbacks on a mountain pass.
Kenny Becker remade Goon with new members and recorded Paint By Numbers, Vol. 1, their most cohesive release to date. Made in the style of early Goon – on a tape machine in Becker’s apartment and their rehearsal space – PBN1 may harken back to Goon’s developmental phase in spirit, but the songs are forward-thinking.
The songs on HOUSE OF CONFUSION benefit from Benton’s workmanlike approach. Each tune sounds so effortlessly poignant that one assumes the album was written in a single afternoon, sitting on a riverbank in golden sunshine, guitar in hand. But any good craftsperson knows, it takes a ton of effort to appear effortless.
Weaponizing expectations is a Cherubs watermark. The Austin noise rock band has made fucking with the format a symbol of authenticity. Listening to SLO BLO 4 FRNZ & SXY, Cherubs’ most recent release for Relapse, offers the same discombobulation of being pulled from a car wreck only to discover you’re physically unscathed.
