Cruel throws another hat into the busy, increasingly-young Chicago ring, with a mosh-able, riff-heavy debut EP on Fire Talk’s new tape imprint Angel Tapes. To-the-point at only four songs over eleven minutes, Common Rituals flexes a driving rhythm section, loud two-guitar attack, and blown-out yelled vocals.
With the generic iPhone alarm at the top of the first track setting the tone, Ismatic Guru’s II is the embodiment of waking up too early and your whole breakfast sticking to the pan. Six minutes of spastic but locked-in grooves with lyrics— when you can process them— that sound a lot like vignettes of drug use but when you look closer, aren’t.
On Blue Skies, with the increased recording budget offered by Fat Possum Records, the group builds upon their sonic foundation for the first time. Synthesizers, shimmering guitar overdubs, and more vocal layers than possibly live-performable combine to transform the songs into larger-than-life versions of themselves.
Together is new slowcore: heavy, gritty, and more nuanced than its modest low-fidelity predecessors. In today’s musical landscape, recordings like those that first established the genre in the 90s are tired appropriation, and the members of Duster are just too busy to put energy to that. Only a pointed update to form is meaningful.
Mother is The Milky Way is not quite a collection of songs and not quite a soundtrack. Rather, it is a twenty-minute meditative experience in an unambiguously Broadcastian space, with equal parts journey through pastoral psychedelic meadows and whiplash-inducing descent into some of the darkest spaces the band has dared to curate.
The songs on Devil Kids— a live album constructed from the audio captured by the four camera mics of a December basement-livestream— are energetic, matured, dare-I-say improved (in the way songs are after sitting with a band for years) versions of studio recordings with the palpable energy of a group that loves playing together.
