post punk – Page 2

EP REVIEW: LVL UP “Three Songs”

Apparently, there is a right way to listen to some records, and I got it wrong when playing LVL UP‘s new EP, Three Songs. According to the lo-fi group’s Bandcamp page, listeners should “[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][dim] the lights, burning all candles found within the dwelling. With eyes open toward the ceiling, the listener feels dull heat from the candles in front of them. Eyes closed now, the listener begins to regulate their breathing and in time presses play on their device.” Since I’ve never been one for rituals, and out of fear of burning down my apartment, I just plugged my laptop into speakers and turned them up past the roar of the AC. The result? Still good.

Three Songs is just that, and they follow the general format of their earlier work but break some new ground. “The Closing Door” is a melancholy track with heavy distortion and a slow, steady beat similar to songs on their last release, Hoodwink’d, but fades into and out of a slightly psychedelic jam during the bridge. “Blur” is a bright pop song reminiscent of tracks like “I Feel Ok,” but brings a new energy, particularly in the rhythm section, and a crisper, cleaner sound. “Proven Water Rites” is a mysterious end to the EP, containing most of the release’s angst: “Remember me, when I’m free I’ll be easy /Nothing underneath/ Breathing fire, breathing steam.”

Candles or no, Three Songs is a great listen from a band that has always had talent, but continues to evolve and polish their sound.

Check out the EP below, available to pre-order now from Run For Cover Records.

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ALBUM REVIEW: Hop Along “Painted Shut”

It’s easy to imagine Frances Quinlan, the vocalist of Philadelphia’s Hop Along, as the frontwoman of a stage-destroying punk band. She seems to put every bit of energy she has into her singing until she’s hoarse and out of breath, twisting her voice from a whisper to a howl. The band behind her, though, provides some relief from her intensity. The rhythm section, made up of Tyler Long on bass and her brother Mark on drums, remains unshakably steady under Joe Reinhart’s wiry guitar.

Painted Shut is Hop Along’s second album, and the first they’ve released through Saddle Creek Records. John Agnello, known for his work with Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth, co-produced and mixed the album, and according to the band, it was “finished in the shortest span of time the band has ever made anything.”

Key tracks on Painted Shut are “Powerful Man” and “Buddy In The Parade.” The first tells the story of what Frances calls her greatest regret: not being able to help a child she suspected was being abused. The second is inspired by the jazz musician Buddy Bolden, who suffered from schizophrenia. “Horseshoe Crabs” deals with another troubled artist, the folk musician Jackson C. Frank, and contains my favorite line on the album: when Frances describes waking up to a sunrise as “staring at the ass-crack of dawn.”

The band is currently on tour, and they’ll be playing at Baby’s All Right on Sunday. If you can’t make it (it is Mother’s Day, after all) you can at least check out the shadowy, illustrated music video for “Powerful Man” below!

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LIVE REVIEW: Yvette/Eaters @ Baby’s All Right

Bob Jones and Jonathan Schenke of Eaters. — Bob Jones and Jonathan Schenke of Eaters

It takes a lot of nerve to wear your white hair long like that: straight, thin, and skimming the neck of your skinny white tie, worn over a tight black t-shirt, matchstick jeans, and elf-point boots. But how else would you dress for your 20^th wedding anniversary? You have to applaud a middle-aged couple that celebrates such an occasion by going to an industrial noise gig in Brooklyn. And on a Thursday no less!

Headlining the evening’s two-band bill is Brooklyn duo Eaters, but if I’m being honest I really came to see Brooklyn duo Yvette. Yvette used to be made up of Noah Karos-Fein and Rick Daniel, who released their debut LP Process in October of 2013. The record is a carefully constructed post punk assault-yet it somehow retains a melodic sensibility along with its steel aggression. The record came at a time when cold and militant industrial music was a breath of fresh air amongst the slew of jangly local bands. Anger was back in. Finally.

Listening to Process is a damn fine experience, but it doesn’t really set you up for what Yvette brings to the stage. No longer the original line up, Yvette is still fronted by Karos-Fein on vocals, guitar, and effects, but Dale Elsinger now backs up Noah on the drums. I never saw Yvette while Rick Daniel was still a member, so I can’t speak for his abilities as a live performer. But what I can say is that Elsinger is a welcome replacement. Quite easily one of the most fascinating drummers I’ve seen live-and I don’t get too excited about drummers all that often-it’s almost impossible to look away while he’s playing.

Perhaps it’s merely the democratic stage set-up the band always employs (Noah at the center and Dale to his left) that creates the allure. Maybe if drummers weren’t always banished to the back of the stage we’d find them mesmerizing more often, but something tells me it’s more that just his coordinates that make Elsinger such an intriguing performer. He gives it his all. Watching him smash his kit is exhausting, so I can’t imagine how winded he must feel, but the fact that he’s dripping in sweat by minute two gives me a good idea. Elsinger’s parts are forceful but not fussy, and so directly to-the-point that I’m tempted to call him a purist. He does he always drum barefoot after all.

Yvette’s sets are never long, but always tidy and packed full of energy. There’s no banter, no fluff, just some very talented, straightforward musicians presenting their thesis and then leaving quietly – though what they play is the antithesis of polite and quiet. It’s loud and full of guts and grit.

Eaters is made up of multi-instrumentalist Bob Jones and recording engineer Jonathan Schenke. Their sound is rooted in the dark rubble of post punk debris, so they are a fitting band to share a bill with Yvette. Though while Yvette’s tracks stay consistently hostile, Eaters sometimes float to the softer side of the ‘80s, sounding more Brian Eno than Suicide.

There is certainly a fuller crowd for Eaters, and their presence is more elaborate; the lights turned down almost all the way to emphasize a sphere of light rotating on a hydraulic circular track. It’s a curious and useless prop, but is a fun badge of nerdiness nonetheless.

Eaters finished off sans encore, making way for the late show to follow at Baby’s. Listening to both Eaters and Yvette you’d suspect a late into the early morning set, but I was home and in bed by midnight, which is good, because some people had anniversaries to celebrate.

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ALBUM REVIEW: Cold Beat “Over Me”

As far as I’m concerned, Hannah Lew–though she plays the bass–is first and foremost a vocal magician. Admittedly that’s because of her work with Grass Widow, the wondrously spooky San Francisco female trio that operates as a kind of tapestry, weaving all three of its members voices together. The result? A cloud of effortlessly harmonized soprano that rises up over post-punkish, surfer-rockish, guitar jangling. The voices are so effervescent that the harmony they make is weightless, and they’re so firmly interlocked that they sound like one big instrument.

They aren’t, though. Lew, who has been writing songs both on her own and with Grass Widow for years, began performing as Cold Beat in 2013 in order to develop on independent voice to run alongside her collaborative one. The full-length Cold Beat debut Over Me, while not quite our first taste of what Lew sounds like solo–she put out a two-song EP called Worms last November–is the first chance we’ve had to see her experiment with her full range as a songwriter.

While she was making it, Lew envisioned Over Me as a catharsis album tinged with paranoia. “Mirror,” the first single to be released, represents Cold Beat at the height of its over caffeinated anxiety, and the blood-letting doesn’t stop with high-energy freak outs. “Abandon,” coming squarely in the middle of the record, plunges us down low to new depths of bleak self-loathing, and then dissolves mid-track into an understated and moody instrumental breakdown. It’s worth noting, by the way, that while the album is unmistakably trauma-centric, I’m extrapolating each track’s particulars from the way the music sounds, not what the words are saying. Cold Beat’s lyrics, like Grass Widow’s, are often difficult to understand, beyond being ominous.

In fact, maybe the blurry lyrics have something to do with the sense of distance you can hear in Lew’s voice. She’s constantly far off on the horizon; she’s aloof in the most punk rock possible way. She soars like a flying superhero across the convulsing, repetitive music beneath her. Her voice is ethereal but bloodless, and about halfway through this album, it occurs to me that the lack of three voices on Over Me translates to a subtle lack of humanness. The aesthetic is aces, after all. The contrast of a faraway voice over a cleverly collaged mashup of retro and DIY sounds, the vague sense of anguish–all fantastically rendered.. The problem lies in that, though both vocals and music are compelling, one is forever floating above the other. Put more plainly: I like Over Me for its loveliness, but it doesn’t hook me by the guts.

Over Me is out on July 8th on Hannah Lew’s own label Crime On The Moon. Preorder your copy here! Check out the subtly bizarre video for “Mirror” below:

Cold Beat – Mirror from Renny McCauley on Vimeo.

TRACK OF THE WEEK: Protomartyr “Scum, Rise!”

Hooray for being angry as fuck! Hooray for growling, depressive post punk! Hooray for creating a dystopian musical landscape that mirrors your hometown! “Scum, Rise!” doesn’t just get at a superbly timed sense of anxiety–with all that compulsively fast strumming and all those bleak lyrics–it also manages to be utterly, shimmeringly beautiful, even in the throes of its own desolation.

With their second studio album Under Color of Official Right, out this coming April, Protomartyr settle deeper into the near-nihilistic, aggressive approach that they established on their debut. This time around, they throw their full weight into an exploration of their hometown, Detroit. Under Color is not an album about Detroit, per se, so much as it creates the full panorama of an aesthetic landscape, complete with a swelling sense of inner turmoil balanced by external sensations: an acute sense of winter, discomfort, and urban decay. Protomartyr is practically bursting with disappointment and anger, along with a bristling intelligence that sets itself up for self-imposed isolation.

Even the group’s name screams portent: casting their lot in as original martyrs can’t be an entirely serious move on the band’s part, but does give them an austere, evocative ring even before you’ve heard the music. I’m reminded of Savages, who released their stellar debut Silence Yourself last year. But Savages’ anger–warped, noisy, and throttling–was nearly always alienating on Silence Yourself—not only was the music so atonal and distorted that it sometimes seemed deliberately repellant, but the lyrics assumed some sort of high priesthood clarity over everyone, especially other musicians, regarding life, or philosophy, or morality, or whatever. The fury and intellectual ostentatiousness is at least half tongue in cheek. I mean, calling your album—of music—Silence Yourself? Hilarious.

Protomartyr, too, spits in your face and tells you to fuck off. But there’s something less enclosed about the riffs, which, even at their darkest, have at least a trace of catchiness. Singer Joe Casey’s vocal lines aren’t distorted enough to seem far away, and remain endearing even at their most gravelly, when he’s flatly repeating the phrase “nothing you can do” towards the end of this track. Maybe it’s the reassurance of being able to hold the backdrop of Detroit in your head as you’re listening to the music: Protomartyr often gets bleak, but never becomes so interior that you get lost as you’re listening.

Listen to “Scum, Rise!” below:

VIDEO REVIEW: Together Pangea “Offer”

Together PANGEA just released this music video to promote their new album Badillac and kicked off their tour around the US. They created it in the spirit of friendship it would seem. That is: it was created with their friends to be watched by others and their friends.

A sense of community is apparent from the opening scene of an energetic crowd chanting “One more song!”. The music begins mildly and the close shots of people’s faces bathed in colorful light syncs really well. These scenes change quickly into more lively interactions and the color gains some lens flares and blinking disco lights. We see friends partying together – laughing, drinking, dancing – in private, in public, and, of course, at a Together PANGEA show. There’s boob-flashing, shotgunning of beers, a dark shot of a Del Taco, and a dude blowing beautiful smoke as two people make out in the background. It’s a very active video, but in tiny spurts that draw attention to a larger lifestyle, and the California they are attempting to capture. What stuck out to me the most was the sense of affection that bleeds through every clip, whether people are shooting beer into each others’ mouths or making funny faces as they rock out. This isn’t just a showcase of debauchery and silliness. It’s a showcase of togetherness. We see a man and a woman hungrily kissing each other, until a guy steps in, drags the man away, and proceeds to hungrily kiss him. Love is just in the air.

You can infer that it is the music and California itself that brings all these people into this drunken, stumbling, potent fun. As the words “Get wasted / And lose best friends” are sung, we see two people clearly enamored with each other. Crowd-surfing. Panties. A gorgeous view of Los Angeles at night from above. The lively, low-fi music and William Keegan’s nasal, scratchy vocals were made to accompany a video like this one. These are scenes and feelings we can all recognize and, more so associate with this band.

Together Pangea goes on tour February 1st. They’ll be at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn on February 14th. Until then, peep the video here:

TRACK REVIEW: We Were Promised Jetpacks “Peace Sign”

Attended by controlled and even sort of jittery guitar lines, Adam Thompson’s arena-ready voice soars on “Peace Sign,” the latest single to be released off We Were Promised Jetpacks‘ forthcoming live album, E Ray: Live In Philadelphia. This album, which was recorded while the band was on tour in 2012, marks WWPJ’s first new release since 2011’s In The Pit Of The Stomach. Though a studio album is, apparently, in the works, the band’s in-person energy is undeniably crucial to their aesthetic–“Peace Sign” displays no asymmetry or lack of polish for being recorded live–and E Ray will seek to recreate the experience of being in the same room with these four Scottish rockers.

“Peace Sign” is as angular and anxiety-laden as any of the band’s previous releases, laying guitar and vocals over a cold, ambient layer of white noise. As the track progresses, the sound opens up into something that’s both more complex and more vulnerable. Thompson’s voice operates almost parallel to the music, meeting the guitar lines at the hinges of their rhythms, and in the meantime, free-falling in a melody that’s all the powerful for how impromptu it feels.

We Were Promised Jetpacks’ music has suffered in the past under the weight of its own moodiness, and In The Pit Of The Stomach seemed to be running in place at times, over thinking its themes and splitting itself between too many musical impulses. A live recording seems to solve a lot of those problems for the band, who may be more inclined towards the “first thought, best thought” school, because “Peace Sign” maintains cohesiveness without losing any of the lyrics’ fretful intimacy.

Listen to “Peace Sign” below:

VIDEO OF THE WEEK 12/2: “Hidden Structures”

The Holograms‘ new video for “Hidden Structures,” off the full-length September release Forever, shows a basic juxtaposition between silence and noise, listlessness and energy. The Swedish foursome loaf on the rooftop of a graffiti-branded shack, stand discontentedly in front of pastel high rises and grassy hills, sit moodily in greenly lit bars, and pile into a station wagon that, against the grey backdrop of Scandinavian highway, looks nearly cartoonishly red. An Asian man stares at the camera, smoking mistrustfully.

By contrast, the band’s brand of heavy, epic synth-rock doesn’t let up once on this track. This rawness is par for the course–with the release of their debut album a little over a year ago, The Holograms established an energy-driven, fast kind of post-punk so cohesive that that made listening to their music feel like a full-body experience, a throttling surround-sound effected by the band’s cohesive vivacity. Their recent follow-up wavered little from the course already set, sticking to large, heavy themes expounded upon via synthesizer, but expanded the breadth of the sound, carving out deeper intricacies of their bass lines and moving further away from communality in the direction of the most insular, most introverted edges of synth-punk.

With scenes of record shops and fast driving, there’s glimmers of rock and roll in the video, but ultimately it’s the divide between outer isolation and inner rage that adds complexity to this song. The effect is one of looking out at the world–in this case, a sparsely populated, quiet and monotone Scandinavian landscape–and creating a vastly different world inside your head. When the band set out to make the new record, they were famously broke and despondent, connecting little with their more electro-inclined Scandinaian musical brethren. The video for “Hidden Structures” plays off that dichotomy, opening up the song to a loneliness that feels gritty and true.

“Hidden Structures” is featured on the Forever album, out via Captured Tracks. Watch the videos for “Hidden Structures” below!

EP REVIEW: Cold Beat “Worms/Year 5772”

Bassist Hannah Lew has released three albums with psychedlic indie rock trio Grass Widow since the band’s debut in 2009, all of them zany, DIY concoctions combining grungy post punk guitar riffs, softly billowing three-part harmony, and space aliens. Now, Lew brings this signature blend to her new band Cold Beat, whose first EP came out yesterday on its frontwoman’s own label, Crime on the Moon.

The themes of self-creation and the way towards creating one’s own reality loom large. This somewhat unimaginatively titled EP consists of two originals, “Worms” and “Year 5772”, followed up by a remix of each of those tracks. Familiar, simple rock and roll distortion coexists with futuristic electronic synth lines, and soft vocals that hang lightly over everything. No one aspect is all that complex, but the combination evokes a sometimes joyful, sometimes disturbed surreality, as if the music underwent a kind of refraction while traveling through outer space.

If these two tracks were less pretty, though, that effect would hit harder. Though the EP brims with high-energy and superheroic-sounding post punk, the sweetness of Lew’s voice is sometimes damned by its own whimsicality, and verges on twee. The harp trills on the Pow! remix of “Worms” escalate the album’s dreaminess too far into preciousness, and Lew’s voice, when in its silvery higher range, adopts a fancifulness that often reads as affected. I craved something grittier and more varied.

This slim EP bodes well for Cold Beat, though: in just two tracks, the group fully realizes and inhabits the world they’ve created. With all the momentum created on Worms, a full-length album from the group can’t be too far off. In the meantime, stream the EP from Rookie Mag, and check out the video for “Worms” below:

COLD BEAT – “WORMS” from Mike Stoltz on Vimeo.

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Tag: post punk