By Owen Neaman, Arts and Culture Editor
Illustration by Naiya Patel-Kapka, Editor-In-Chief
We have two Sub Pop albums on this one, I swear I’m not paid to do this (er, by Sub Pop). Every other album on here is definitively chill, and several have been on repeat alongside EQ’s stuff after I saw them perform at the ’Sco. I’m also cutting my suggestions for best listening so I can write more about these albums. Lots of love, and happy listening.
OEN
Jazz Dreams – Fine
Fine joins the ranks of ML Buch and Astrid Sonne as another alumni of Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory specializing in spacey minimalist rock. And unlike her fellow alums, she makes her influences far more obvious: her voice sounds like Hope Sandoval or Ultraviolence-era Lana Del Rey, and the instrumentation on her albums is pulled straight from slow ’60s pop and folk. She warps everything she steals, though; often the end result sounds less like a Mazzy Star song and more like what you’d hear if you’d fallen asleep next to an antique radio playing Mazzy Star. The effect is desolate, sensual, and sometimes boring, but everything adds to the nocturnal ambiance of the album. The hypnagogic music coming out of RMC seldom evokes a sense of place as well as this album does; you can practically see the liminal cabaret that this album is meant to soundtrack. Fine turns the familiar into the uncanny and hypnotic, and you’re a patron in her eerie world until she decides to open the doors back up.
Hear: “Any minute”
HOW TO QUIT SMOKING – Dominic Fike
Dominic Fike proves he’s more ambitious than a 14-minute album, though it’s a good thing his laxness hasn’t gone away. His style now sounds more ambitious, or at least bigger. The summery R&B feels like a grander experience than a laptop with a guitar plugged in, the flips between his rapping and singing are cooler, and the features from Grace Ives, Danny Brown, and Emma Ogier make his struggle for sobriety and growing up feel conversational instead of egocentric. Some of his maturity signalling is tedious: his recording of a prison phone call with Tay-K is a lazy way to ensure that you’ve caught everything he’s said for the past 40 minutes. Ignore that, and you have a blissful collection of slacker-soul that you’ll get to fully enjoy when it’s 70 degrees again.
Hear: “CABBY”
The Holy Cross Tigers – Twisted Teens
New Orleans’ Twisted Teens have an album of Ween-fried country crossed with the clamor of a local old-time band trying to blow out their amplifiers. There’s stomp in most every song without any clap-hey, and the twang and whistle of every song is riotous, funny, and drunkenly charming. The galloping, overdriven drums and the scuzziness of Ramon Santos’ pedal steel plays like a bar fight, and Caspian Hollywell sings over it all in a lilting, David Berman-esque cowboy voice. A little retro, sure, but these songs are raucous enough to make the AM Country Radio ideal of beer and horses finally sound wondrous and thrilling.
Hear: “When We First Met”
Perfecth – Queens of the Stone Age
Queens of the Stone Age went from making earthquaking stoner rock to ornate and orchestrated pop rock and I didn’t mind at all. I can also get past the internet calling Josh Homme a DILF after his runway at Paris Fashion Week. Because until now, QOTSA were still into the weird and beautifully ominous, and held to their heaviness and stoned sensibilities as recently as their last album. But after doing a series of acoustic shows, they’ve made an almost exclusively soft rock album that lacks everything that I adored about them: this is a slab of painfully generic and nondescript acoustic generica. No string orchestras or sweet crooning from Homme can salvage the absence of texture and creativity, and the closest they get to their old sound is on the cringily titled “Where the Goth Girls At?”. The robotic weirdness of their instrumentation and the lumbering, gigantic rhythm section that have made for their most memorable songs have been replaced with complete flatness. Their aim, according to Homme, has been to create music that’s either beautiful, scary, or sexy: they've decided to go for “pleasant” instead.
Hear: “Insignificant Other”
ZIRP! – DIIV
DIIV’s dreamy guitar pop gets the A.G. Cook treatment and thankfully sounds more noisy and irreverent than before. The guitars sound like a swarm of helium balloons, the drums sound plucked from DnB stems, and the calculated digital glitch of it all conjures nostalgia for the ’90s shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine and Medicine. The quiet and restrained songs lack the lushness to keep me hooked, but the bangers on this one sound crisp, uncompressed, and at last, danceable. There is a sharp incongruence between DIIV’s sound and the jabs they try to make at American demagogues: most of the vocals sound bleary and drugged out, and you wouldn’t be able to tell that this ethereal album is a political statement until you hear the words “Pfizer-Palintir collab pill” randomly come through your headphones. As much as I appreciate their lyrical sentiments and music separately, this might be the strongest proof that if you’re going to sing about fascism, at least try to sound threatening.
Hear: “Dare Me”
you made me / skin on linen – PISS
When I started listening to punk 11 years ago, the albums I found most alluring—not necessarily the ones I liked the most—were the ones I perceived as the most viscerally terrifying. I don’t think my fascination with that kind of music was ever problematic or extreme, though I never reflected on the dynamic between the listeners and creators of trauma-inspired music until I heard this album.
On PISS’ debut album, the Vancouver band questions why we pay disproportionate attention to women’s art only when it focuses on the abuse they face. When singer Taylor Zantingh sings harrowing songs about childhood sexual assault, the line between listener-as-spectator/voyeur and audience-as-participant is intentionally blurred to an uncomfortable extent. She interrogates the listener about what it will take for them to find her pain convincing, and asks, “I don’t know if writing about violence is helping me, am I helping you?” The question hangs over the entire album, and when she recollects her experiences with diary-entry specificity and directly addresses her abuser, it feels wrong to be listening to it, let alone nodding along to it.
Zantingh makes it clear that this isn’t an opportunity for the listener to watch her process pain (and interspersed are sampled audios from Toni Morrison, Andrea Dworkin, and Manon Garcia, who shift the focus from how women process pain to rather how men should be held accountable). Instead, this album aims to give the listener a perspective on what it means to consume music about abuse. It feels wrong to implore people to listen to this album, or to qualify its merit, which means it has done what it’s trying to do. I expect it will join the canon of punk albums that are praised for their emotional catharsis, but I hope it instead becomes the benchmark for artists getting audiences to question how they listen, and maybe what they listen to.
Listen to: The whole thing.
