Chicago

Matthew J Van Howe “Legend of the Galactic Princess”

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Matthew J Van Howe recently released his latest album, Legend of the Galactic Princess, which finds him combining fantasy with dark, experimental synthwave.

This album is huge contrast to his 2020 album, Memories Otherwise Forgotten, which found Van Howe composing for piano.

Chicago

Threshing Spirit “The Abyss’ Embrace (A Ship Of Fools)”

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Threshing Spirit has released the first single, "The Abyss’ Embrace (A Ship Of Fools)", from his forthcoming The Crucible which is due out on October 28th via American Decline.

This is the Black Metal persona of label head Jordan Reyes, and The Crucible will be his debut full-length album as Threshing Spirit.

L.A.

Bloodcat’s “Summer Single” Delivers Vulnerable, Atmospheric Indie Rock

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photo courtesy of artist

L.A. by way of Florida drummer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Bloodcat (aka Jessica Vacha), has seen her fair share of the local scene as a session drummer, lending her percussive talents to several up-and-coming acts, all while steadily working on her own original music. Her latest single, appropriately entitled Summer Single and available now on Spotify and most other major streaming outlets, is a sign of steady growth for the singer-songwriter that foreshadows greater things yet to come from this talent.

A-side “Generic Script” is a propulsive, muscular, but also charmingly vulnerable guitar and drum-forward indie-pop track that displays Vacha’s talent for merging catchy melody with effortless indie cool, especially in the interplay between instruments. Taking a minimalistic approach, the bare-bones arrangement evokes 90s-era indie-pop while also dispalying a distinctly 2020s touch for the modern.

B-side “Enough,” by contrast, evokes Mazzy Star in its slower-tempo, more contemplative tone. It begins with abstract electric guitar strums that deliver a distinct feeling of floating, unmoored to any key, until Vacha and the rest of the band enter as one. Vacha’s sedate, elegant vocal radiates weariness and sadness, complementing the spare, wide-open arrangement. it’s an audio equivalent of a Mark Rothko painting: fields of muted colors hovering close enough to each other that they can’t help but be taken as one, but never truly touching, forever together but forever apart.Gabe Hernandez

NYC

Psychic Graveyard release “A Good-Looking Ghost”

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Psychic Graveyard specialize in creating music built around a rich noughty center of garage rock backbeat and drone-y pummeling marshmallow fluff and infusing it with gooey streaks of wah-wah effects and random nuggets of congealed noise and covering the whole heart-clogging concoction in a hard-candy shell of throbbing synthesized sub-bass and Sprechstimme vocals—with the end result being vaguely menacing and entirely intoxicating, that is if you’re built for this sorta stuff which is something like if you took the entire candy bar aisle at your local Wawa convenience store and somehow transformed it into a gnarley fused musical version so if you’re “Looking For Mr. Goodbar” well you just found him.

Who are Psychic Graveyard? Enquiring minds want to know! The band themselves describe it best, so I’ll quote from their Spot-i-fried bio here: “Noise Rock pioneers, Eric Paul (Arab On Radar, Chinese Stars, Doomsday Student), Paul Vieira (Chinese Stars, Doomsday Student), and Nathan Joyner (Some Girls, All Leather, Hot Nerds), [and] Charles Ovett (Battle Beasts, Joules) venture through uncharted territory with their new band. Nathan Joyner’s grinding synths and ‘found sound’ buries the seed of each song deep into the fertile ground–while Paul Vieira’s manic, fuzzed-out guitars, Ovett’s bombastic drumming, and Eric Paul’s obsessive lyrics shower the proceedings with equal parts sunshine and rain" and see below for some interesting and occasionally alarming but in a good way videos (parental discretion inadvisable) from the various projects listed above.

Psychic Graveyard’s latest single is called “A Good-Looking Ghost” and it can be witnessed at the top of this page. It’s a strong contender for this year’s Most Outstanding Achievements In Creating A Song That Sounds Exactly Like It Should Based On The Title Alone award and it’s also commendable for its opening quatrain which ably lays out the ghost’s origins: “This is not the death that I wanted / but this is the death that I got / The bleeding started around Christmas / and I was dead by March.” So if this sort of thing gets your goat (or your ghost’s goat, or goat’s ghost) and if you’re digging this then check out more of their stuff below. (Jason Lee)

Chicago

Bnny “August”

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Bnny has shared the latest single, "August", from their forthcoming debut album, Everything, which is due out on August 20th via Fire Talk.

This is the work of Jess Viscius alongside her twin sister Alexa Viscius, plus best friends Tim Makowski, Matt Pelkey, and Adam Schubert. Of the new single Jess had this to say; “‘August’ is about fleeting summer nights in the hazy heat of Chicago,” she says. “It’s about knowing what’s best for you and doing the exact opposite. It’s about the lies we tell ourselves to keep going.”