Words by Jason Lee who writes really long sentences (n.b. the songs below are arranged in totally random order and not numbered acc. to any kind of ranking system or American Top 69-style countdown)…
MAKES SENSE WE GOTTA START HERE: The world may be going to hell in a handbasket but on People Pleasers Pleasing People (released late last spring on the Hawthorne, New Jersey-based Mint 400 label) STRANGE NEIGHBORS demonstrate how we can all HELP TO EFFECT PRODUCTIVE CHANGE IN OUR OWN SMALL WAYS and together make the world an even worse place to live in than before by becoming an “Influencer” influencing people via means of “1 part ignorance, 2 parts desperation, a dash of microplastics, and 12 parts military-industrial complex” tho’ it doesn’t hurt to have a killer garage rock/R&B type hook to open yr song with to lubricate listeners’ ear-buds in the everlasting quest to be heard and earn “social currency backed by existential dread” cuz for reals you can’t catch lemmings without a hook [editor’s note: lemmings aren’t fish, they’re rodents, but we’ll let the metaphor stand] and the song’s hooky as hell which is a good thing cuz nothing’s much sadder than an uninfluential influencer not influencing people…
…but Strange Neighbors got nothin’ to worry about cuz they’re legit weird enough to demand yr attention and possibly live next door with this being their most succinct (if you can’t say it in 2-and-a-half minutes, it’s not worth saying!), boppiest, arguably most danceable tune to date which are great tools for building up brand awareness and repeat listens to get those streaming numbers up to geyser-like proportions (tho’ unfortunately no one’s likely to fall asleep to “Influencer” on repeat cuz it’s just too damn spunky) not to mention the harmonies and the pass-the-baton leads which help to differentiate each individual band member (Sporty, Scary, Sleazy, and Ginger!) which is key to meaningful parasocial engagement for boy/girl bands and if you insist upon a F2F meetup they’re actually good at the live performance thing and you can catch ’em live at NuBlu Classic on 9/18 or at Pianos on 10/15 [legal disclaimer: this sentence contains sponsored content].
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2) WHEN THE GOIN’ GETS WEIRD, THE WEIRD GET GOIN’ and if there’s a band out there ready to prove the maxim it’s gotta be DEAD TOOTH cuz real talk there’s always been something a little alien about ‘em like they learned how to rock from Max Rebo & the Jizz-Wailers and what’s more all of Dead Tooth’s members look like they could be named Droopy McCool except for lead warbler Zach Ellis that is with his more Sy Snoodles-like frame and mic-work, experts all at playing spindly-legged rock ’n’ roll complete with Sun Ra Orkestra-like sax interjections on saxophone and, well, space is clearly the place for these fellas but worry not cuz clearly the Dead Toothers have come in peace and wanna help the world from going to pieces and to that end they released their 3rd LP recently with songs like “Chuckin’ and Wingin’ It” meant to prep us for how best to face the end times (opening lyric: “The worlds burnin’ and I don’t feel a thing / like ash hangin’ off her mile long cigarette”) by simply chuckin‘ all the toxic bad stuff in life and just wingin’ it otherwise on a wing and a prayer…
click above to be transported to another realm…namely Buenos Aires and Ridgewood
…with the song having both a frantic quality (typical!) but also a Droopy McCoolness to it too thanks to the Spaghetti Western high-lonesome vibes especially that repeating “uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh” that’s life halfway between a man with no name and a horse with no name [editor’s note: so like a centaur with no name?] with a video starring Dead Tooth’s official avatar, dancer/choreographer/part-time used car salesman/human pool noodle Nola “Oola” Sporn Smith, literally grasping the ungraspable with great skill & grace both in Dead Tooth’s music videos and at their live shows too sometimes like she’s struggling valiantly to flee some terrible invisible force and it’s breathtaking to witness and as a final note we gotta say “yea gerunds!” cuz it’s fun droppin’ the ‘g’ at the end of ’em which makes everything about 100 times cooler cuz just imagine if the Beach Boys had sung, “let us go surfing now / everybody is learning how” you’d tell those nerds to go play in their sandbox but not so Dead Tooth who are here to save the universe.
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3) EVERY ONE INNA WHILE WE LIKE TO CHECK IN ON THE HONDURAN POP SCENE seeing as the whole Tri-State Area plays host to a significant number of Honduran immigrants with the biggest communities found in the West Bronx, Central Islip in Strong Island and scattered across northern New Jersey a.k.a. Tromaville and also seeing as we’re big fans of ISABELLA LOVESTORY—born in the capital city of Tegucigalpa and raised in Puerto Cortes on the northern coast, we think—-ever since we saw Lovestory perform a killer set on a 2020 Adult Swim festival livestream in the middle of coronavirus lockdown who besides having one of the best pop-star monikers around manages to live up to it too with a steady stream of sonically adventurous, reggaeton-laced, avant–garde artpop a.k.a. “neo-perreo” confections and what’s more Lovestory currently resides in Canada which makes her an honorary New Yorker based on sheer cosmopolitanism alone with the title track of her latest EPVanity continuing to expand the reach of Lovestory’s globe-trotting sonic footprint…
…by throwing some squelchy synthwave textures and percolating new wavey riddims into the mix like the soundtrack to Snake Plissken trying to break out of a Central American ICE facility with the music video for “Vanity” having a fittingly trippy horror-esque fever dream vibe to it too what with the escapees of an overturned art farm crawling all over the camera lens and Isabella finding herself trapped in an endless series of hallways at one point etc. as she throws a little cold water on the fame monster by noting that “I am my own illusion…vanity is cruelty…the lies are reality” (rendered here in translation) which is a pretty astute reading of both celebrity culture and current political realities with Ms. Loverstory going for the jugular (as usual) when it comes to wedding brash confidence, psychedelia, and eroticism and lucky for us she’ll no doubt be performing this song and much more live at Elsewhere on September 21st.
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4) IF TRACK TWO OF QUEENS-BASED POP-PUNK COMBO STARLESS CITIES’ debut EP The Friends We Made Along The Way weren’t already called “Duct Tape” we’d assume it to be called “A Day in the Life of a Music Blogger” cuz by the time singer-songwriter, 3D-printing-guitarist and music photographer on the side Adam Saifer has finished the first four lines of this “emo” ditty we gotta wonder if this sneaky mofo somehow read our diary which at least isn’t as embarrassing as our old LiveJournal page, quoting from those first four lines: “I don’t wanna go to work tomorrow [we work mostly from home and still we think this!] / where can I find a friend for the weekend [the Deli’s always looking for fun show-going buddies!] / and where can I go that’s not within these four walls [see line #1 above] / and where can I feel something real tonight [besides feeling intestinal distress from late night visits to our local 24-hour White Castle), questions lent additional urgency by the galloping drums and rampaging bass but don’t get it twisted cuz Starless Cities ain’t yo momma’s emo-y pop-punk band what with the unexpected sonic flourishes scattered throughout like flanged tom-tom fills and tasty slap-bass portamento…
…with the Queens’ collective coming by their emo/pop-punk bona fides honestly seeing as Starless Cities (or Adam at least, we need to get to know the other guys!) are nearly lifelong fans of bands like Fall Out Boy and enjoy the first recorded works (!) by bands like Say Anything, My Chemical Romance, panic at the disco, Paramour and Hanson as demonstratedly demonstrated by the expertly executed staccato palm-muted verses and set distortion pedals to stun chant-along choruses with ever-so-slightly detuned harmonies heard on Friends, building up the emotional tension and only releasing that tension so it can be built up again in a process of musical fusion and fission generating enuf kilowatt hours per song to manufacture no less than 20 pairs of skinny jeans and even if the band comes up short in the asymmetrical hair department with eye-covering fringe you gotta give ’em break cuz it ain’t 2008 in case you hadn’t noticed…
…and in closing we’d like to reiterate a couple still-salient points from those aforementioned LiveJournal posts such as: “Music is a beautiful thing, whether it be emo, country, or John fucking Tesh…just try & respect that” except, that is, for“elitist bastards who think that they are the shit because they listen to Pedro the Lion” (called that one!), two statements that when taken together perfectly capture the mix of vulnerability/relatability/sympathy vs. the contention that pretty much everyone and everything totally sucks (who could argue!) that basically serves as yr typical emo kids‘ internal combustion engine so raise a middle finger to the (Jimmy Eat) world and yelp into the cold, unfeeling void: “let’s put POD, Creed, Nickleback, Default, Stained and that ‘just a kid’ band in a blender, and make a SHIT SHAKE!“
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5) ST.CLAIR’s “I Stole My Film From Walgreens” WINS THE TITLE OF LEAST INTUITIVE SONG TITLE not only for its being an instrumental but also cuz a less whimsical title like “Hellhound on my Trail” feels like it’d be more apropos to the music except it’s taken already cuz the song’s like a slow-burn pas de deux between dread and rage dancing in the pale moonlight, serenaded by thrashing drums, throbbing bass, and two droney dueling guitars hard-panned to the far left and far right of the stereo spectrum which is perhaps a sly commentary on our current politic climate with each side vowing In Times Like These There Is No Surrender tho’ only one side of the spectrum is building up and deploying its own extra-judicial private militia but we digress…
…which also happens to be the name of the St. Louis-based band’s debut LP and admittedly stealing rolls of photographic film from a major corporation is a fairly high-stakes operation cuz they could very well have their own private militia as well (the Walgreens’ Brownshirts!) even for safeguarding a niche commodity purchased exclusively by oldsters and alt-youngsters which itself feels fitting considering St. Clair is very much a band of young ‘uns but they sound like old souls who prob woulda gotten signed to a label like Chemical Underground if this were 1996 or 1997 or even 2003 and kept a visual tour diary with the help of a Vivitar point-and-shoot for their brand new MySpace page…
…with many of the LP’s songs starting off all mellow ‘n’ moody before burrowing beneath their own tranquil surfaces into the churning, murky depths below and if you’re German yr probably thinking sturm und drang or better yet “strum und drang” (!) or maybe of Robin Williams’ nerdy-photo-developer-cum-serial-killer performance in the 2002 psychological thriller One Hour Photo except imagine Friday Night Lights post-rockers Explosions in the Sky or Icelandic jabberwocky proponents Sigur Rós doing the soundtrack and that’d be more like it and btw speaking of all things European (full disclosure!) yours truly happens to be a blood relation of the band’s frontguy Ian Simmons a few times removed (third-and-a-half cousins?) as part of the Irish McGoverns clan so take all of the above with a grain of nepotistic salt but honestly we’d just ignore the record and disown our thirdish cousin if this record wasn’t any good tho’ admittedly it could be in our shared DNA ancestry to appreciate melancholic yet frequently cathartic songs and REALLY WHAT’S MORE PROTOTYPICALLY IRISH than a sentiment like, “I can feel everything but can’t move.”
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6) FOR ALL Y’ALL OUT THERE WHO JUST WANNA KNOW where’s the doggone, gosh-darned, goddamned cowpunk music to be found on this rotten blog well look no further than song #6 on this list (you’re soaking in it!) cuz with “Paper Man”, the band popularly known as CRAB have bestowed upon humanity the finest, most highly concentrated, distilled to the purity and glass-cutting strength of a rock hard diamond examples of the genre that we’ve heard inna minute or more personally to the point where if one were to include “Paper Man” on a Now That’s What I Call Cowpunk 33 “as seen on TV” CD compilation alongside such classics as “Glad ’n’ Greasy” by the Beat Farmer or “Bowl Full of Noses” by Country Bob and the BloodFarmers or Elvis Hitler’s “Ten Wheels for Jesus“…
…well we’re betting most listeners wouldn’t blink an eye seeing as it easily holds its own both in the lyrical and musical departments with the song’s playfully polka-adjacent riddims fused to a gut-punching, internal organ-pummeling musical wallop all in service of a story that wastes no time moving from a “meet cute” on the vast grassy plains of the Great Plains (“you were looking for your cattle / I was practicing my aim“) or maybe even the Serengeti just like in that song by Toto, to teaming up for a Bonnie & Clyde-like criminal rampage (“our hands bathed in blood / our pockets filled with oil barren silver and gold“) to a twist ending we won’t reveal here but let’s just say it involves a femme fatale playing the long con and despite having their riches snatched (not to mention being murdered, whoops I guess we revealed the ending!) CRAB have truly spared no expense in creating the song’s music video (see above!) depicting all this more or less.
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7) WE CAN’T QUITE DECIDE WHETHER SAVOIA are moreso purveyors of winking sleazy-presenting wholesomeness, or wholesale choir-boy-presenting sleaziness—thus embodying a duality that’d make them excellent candidates to star in a live-action, rock music, gender-switched, boy-band-with-an-attitude adaptation of Kpop Demon Hunters where they’re all like cutie pop stars by day, demon-slaying saviors of their fans’ souls at night, or say they went back in time to the 1980s the four-piece would be the equivalent of having two Corey Heims (RIP) and two Corey Feldmans in the same group which is maybe why they give off such strong Lost Boys vibes, all they need to do is to add an oiled-up, gyrating saxophonist to become this generation’s INXS and we mean this very much as a compliment cuz Listen Like Thieves (full LP and single) still sounds badass and sexy AF to this day but we digress…
…with Savoia likewise being a band that deftly balances pub-rock grittiness with slithery, serpentine funk-pop, not to mention combining killer hooks with killer haircuts which is an age-old pathway to superstardom, as heard on the two-week-ish old single “In This Fire” which starts off with a prowling, feline energy centered around a start-stop descending chord progression giving off Arthur Lee and Love that a flamenco dancer could really go to town with, which after a couple of minutes transitions into a suspense-building breakdown/build-it-back-up section that starts off with some delicious dissonance that culminates with a double-picked, string-overbending, finger-tapped, and tremelo-abusing solo that’s tastier than Tastee Freez, shreddier than Shredded Wheat to say the least and what better way to keep the demons at bay.
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8) OXA is short for “oxygen” AND INDEED THERE’S SOMETHING TERRIFICALLY IF NOT TERRIFYINGLY ELEMENTAL about OXA’s music and her singing and when it comes to the elements Coming For God‘s EP-closing “Speak My Name” has always struck us as being very much in the realm of water signs (speaking as a real-life Cancer so we know a thing or two!) with OXA’s emotional intelligence, intuition, and watery sensuality on full display not to mention a voice possessed of the acrobatic dexterity of Björk (birth sign: Scorpio) crossed with the bell-like clarity of Enya (chiron in Pisces) and indeed the new music video for “Speak My Name” confirms this reading with OXA taking on the role of siren/water nymph/sea-maiden/mermaid, i.e., creatures with transformative, shape-shifting powers much like the voice in question, or like water itself, which easily transforms into ice or dissolves into vapor in response to the environment seeing as water signs are known for being empathetic as well…
…and indeed when OXA sings run-on sentences like, “Speak my name I’ll harvest your love with a knife so sharp and rancid that when it hits you’ll never forget the pain so good It’s planted” it’s not immediately obviously whether these words are meant to be nurturing or more aggressively oriented and ditto the pledge to pick/break the lock to your heart tho’ really what does it even matter when a mysterious, etherial creature rises out of the sea foam draped in diaphanous, flimsy scraps of white fabric with a voice that more than merely singing melodies envelopes them like a black-eyed Susan vine or a boa constrictor with a tumbling flurry/fury of trills, twists and turns reminiscent of Satan’s wings tumbling down from heaven for not many could resist such entreaties.
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9) From Santana’s “Evil Ways” to ELO’s “Evil Woman”; from the Poppy Family’s “Where Evil Grows” to Eartha Kitt’s “I Want To Be Evil” THERE’S A LONG, PROUD TRADITION of moodily mid-tempo, lushly textured, slow-burning bangers with the word “evil” in the title that, while infused with the sense of foreboding you’d expect of songs about the nature of evil, also acknowledge its oft-seductive appeal w/freedom ‘n’ bondage seemingly intertwined and then there’s the pervasive “evil, thy name is woman” angle whether from a borderline misogynistic point-of-view (Carlos grouses about not having a hot dinner prepared by his hot kitchen-bound lady waiting for him, “when I come home, baby / my house is dark and my pots are cold”) or sometimes a more liberatory POV (the Eartha Kitt song embodies this perfectly even if somewhat tongue-in-cheekily: “I wanna be nasty, I wanna be cruel / I wanna be daring, I wanna shoot pool“) which just goes to show how the personal is the political and that sometimes you gotta be a little evil yourself to defend against more pernicious forms of evils whether perpetuated by evil ex’s or evil empires…
…with SARA DEVOE’s single “Evil Genius” extending this tradition all the way to Summer 2025, opening with a fittingly bewitching interplay between a weeping guitar figure and violin (Devoe co-produced the track with Michael McCanna) with the latter provided by none other than Shining Hours’ David Tsai with the tragi-sensuous tension ratcheted up further by Sara’s hushed but increasingly agitated vocals confessing, “I needed this fight…think I might need you for life / for making me cry, making me cry,” but the more times she repeats “making me cry” and “you didn’t have to, you didn’t have to” as mantra-like phrases as the music drifts into a swirling miasma of emotional drift and difficult-to-reconcile desire, the more powerfully it evokes the relatable ambiguity/anxiety of falling in love with an evil genius of such Machiavellian proportions that their evil genius may not at all times be strenuously resisted or fully recognized…
[Editor’s note: since the time this was originally written up, S.D. has released an additional single, “A Secret / The Moon“, which alongside “Evil Genius” and (one assumes) the previously released bossanova-flavored “Echo” with Mikey Leão (also 2025) will subsequently be found among the tracks on Sara’s relatively soon to appear upcoming full-length…
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10) ON MIAMI-BASED DOC BROWN’S REMIX OF VANCOUVER-BASED DJ-PRODUCER NEW GIRL’S SECOND SINGLE, “4312,” RELEASED ON UNLEARN:RECORDS, she generously bequeaths a head-nodding, uprocking-worthy, trippy tech-house banger to humanity or at least to those segments of humanity who may understand such a phrase but really all you gotta understand is the beat, the beat, the beat and be willing to let it take over your body, mind, and soul…
…with the easiest way of going about it—minus a warehouse rave in yr vicinity—is to hop on TWITCH™ (Editor’s note: this is a non-sponsored post btw, unless someone wants to make it otherwise), a streaming platform catering to video game players that’s ended up providing a home to a small army of live-streaming DJs—typically broadcasting from their own personal spaces (bedrooms/kitchens/broom closets) which is about as DIY as it gets even if some of ’em do bring crazy production values—not to mention metal drummers, country line dancers, emo-karaoke singing ventriloquists, live-to-Logic songwriters and request takers, self-taught harpist-guitarists, and Bob Ross body painters and music-video curators of all sorts not to mention weirdness like this…
…which taken together easily beats out the bigger ecosystem of Youtubers in our book (Editor’s note: don’t dox me, bro!) thanks to the electricity that comes from the grand majority of streams on the platform being streamed live in real time and it was this very liveness that drew us to Twitch in the first place during pandemic lockdown when “liveness” was at a premium and then we got kinda addicted to it and to the whole digital traveling circus vibe overall, pandemic outbreak or no, where not unlike sideshow performers and street musicians the world over, streamers “pass the hat,” encouraging patronage thru subscriptions and “hype trains” and one-off tips but w/cash-poor viewers and chintzy voyeurs still welcome to watch assuming a willingness to sit thru ad breaks…
Cold Vancouver nights drive the aspiring DJ inside, enfolded in their warm digital cocoons
…with New Girl’s Twitch stream typically starting well into the evening and lasting well until into wee hours (esp. in NYC with the time difference!) perfect for insomniacs like yours truly, with New Girl specializing in the hybrid genre known as “tech house” which crosses the techno-hypnosis of motorik style techno beats (great for concentration! great for zoning out!) with the “house” side of things, i.e. disco bounce, soulful singing, and other splashes of color to the musical palette not to mention the splashes of Fireball Whiskey with New Girl leading a raised shot-glass toast every hour or two during streams in tribute to the cinnamon-y liquor with viewers likewise raising a virtual glass in the chat and likely a real one at home (editor’s note: Fireball isn’t a sponsor either but they should esp. seeing as we routinely sneak the minis into any nightclub charging $11 for a Corona) and it’s just these kinds of personal details that you come to learn as a regular viewer of someone’s channel and as a member of the larger Twitchosphere not that the sphere is entirely free of drama or controversy cuz this is the Internet after all…
…with another fact we learned first-hand is how New Girl’s original music is 100% sample-free meaning that all the sounds, textures, timbres, riddims, etc. are created from scratch and not built from mixing and matching off-the-rack, prefab sonic elements like readymade loops or keyboard presets or at least that’s how we understand it which means that on New Girl’s newest single “4312” you’re hearing THE UNEXPURGATED ESSENCE OF NEW GRRRL made audible in not only in the chanted, whispered, insisted vocals but also in the hard-hitting, more-intricate-than-you’d-think beats and gritty bass sequencing with Doc Brown’s remix only enhancing its hypnotic pleasures…
…bringing to mind early Daft Punk and other French Touch/French House artists known for building tracks around short, looped samples—like a Sufi mystic chanting ’til an out-of-body experience seems likely—heightened by all manner of distortions, phasers, filter sweeps, and Cuisinarted cuts-and-chops and you’d best believe decks make noise for the girls and boys / mixing up the beats like 3-4-1-2 with our only reservation here being how Yankee youth, already tragically bad at math, could be further thrown off by the numerical switch-up and we hardly need to be declaring war on Canada right now for subverting our education system (plus our government’s doing just fine on that front already) plus they’d probably kick our asses…
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11) AT FIRST WE WERE GOING TO WRITE ABOUT PAN ARCADIA’s “Follow Through” off their most recent EP, Switched On which is just like Wendy Carlos’s pioneering Switched On Bach except minus the Bach, plus a swaggering Stonesy stomp, that despite it’s Swingin’ London vibes finds time to quote the Beatles’ “I Am The Walrus” (goo goo g’joob, baby!) and therein lies the duality at the heart of “Follow Thru” as we see it and spell it but given the even more recent release of their team-up with fellow Jagger-swaggerer BEC LAUDER, lauded far and wide for her incendiary live shows and singer-songwriter-shredder mastery, on a song called “Don’t Mean Much” it seemed a no-brainer to make a lateral move and kill two birds with one killer stoner-rock anthem [editor’s note: The Deli does not advocate murdering birds]…
…tho’ you certainly don’t have to be a stoner to enjoy the track but either way right from its opening bars it introduces a head-nodding chord progression on a tinny-sounding guitar, that is, until a few seconds later where the riff explodes into sensurround proportions with a wailing lead, throbbing riddims and what sounds like a harmonica buried in the mix even hitting something like the terpenes first hitting your frontal lobe as Eamon Rush assures us in unhurried fashion esp. given his surname that “it don’t mean much that I wrote this song / it wasn’t hard, it didn’t take too long” but it does mean much that “you sing along…over and over and over again“…
…but then again before long you’ll be left “sizzling on the floor” as the song reaches its duel-sung, horn-assisted crescendo and for supposedly not meaning much there’s an impressive level of instrumental and vocal passion brought to bear where if this were the ’90s Pan Arcadia + Bec Lauder would be more equivalent to riding a champaign supernova to the heavens than declaring oneself a L-O-S-E-R and asking random passers-by to kill you which you shouldn’t do anyway cuz for one thing you’ll wanna stick around for Pan Arcadia’s upcoming album-length manifesto dropping in October and to enjoy Bec Lauder and the Noise’s only-days-ago release (lead guitar: Soph Shreds; drums: Maggie Bishop) of their debut full-length bow, The Vessel, for life right now is actually pretty good (also: release party this Thursday!) despite what the news people may tell you…
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12) IT’S BEEN CLAIMED IN CERTAIN CIRCLES THAT THERE’S BEEN NO OFFICIAL SONG OF THE SUMMER IN 2025 TO WHICH WE SAY ‘PHOOEY!’ but it sure as heck ain’t some drivel by Alex Warren whoever that is or Morgan Wallen (yes, dood, you are the problem!) cuz clearly these certain circles don’t know what the heck they’re talkin’ about seeing as the “song of the summer” in question is clearly SAY SHE SHE’s “Under the Sun,” a song advocating for the natural endorphin release provided by literal light and metaphorical enlightenment (“power is a light source”) while noting that living in debt and living under the gun makes the simple act of going out and having some fun in the sun all the more crucial to one’s mental health…
…cuz otherwise you keep grinding yourself down and have no soul left to sell and like a certain anarcho-feminist once said if I can’t dance to it, then you can keep your stinkin’ revolution and just try listening to “Under the Sun” without moving to it even if it’s just a gently swaying motion (counts as dancing in our book!) thanks to Say She She’s patented combo of etherial harmonies and soulful head noddin’ grooves with such a revolutionary song in our book with it being precisely the sort of non-vacuous balm we all need these days and thusly the song of the summer that’s actually about the summer.
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13) COLATURA ARE TO BE COMMENDED FOR WRITING AND RECORDING A SONG THAT (AT LAST!) SPEAKS THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH openly admitting the dirty secret behind almost every love song and love-gone-wrong song especially in our current dark age of nominal love songs just as likely to be about self-love as love of another (not that kind of self-love!) tho’ they tend to cloak their self-love in grossly self-aspirational psychobabble which just goes to show how prescient Patrick Bateman was about our musical future tho’ still it’s true that even in the remaining love songs that claim to be about loving someone else singer-and/or-songwriters are still loath to admit “(Every Time I Think About You) It’s About Me” as Colatura so boldly do in their song by the same title found on the aptly titled If I’m Being Honest EP versus the many singer-and-or/songwriters who constantly dance around admitting such a thing only but hinting at it, never deigning to state it outright while still making extra sure to let you know exactly how it makes them feel to be in love, how very good or how very bad it makes them feel as if we should even care or need to know (we keed! we keed!).
…which btw given the long parenthetical alongside a clever tho’ ultimately self-lacerating turn of phrase we realize that yr likely assuming we’re talkiin’ a classic-country type song here as sung in the style of Tammy, Dolly, or Loretta, but Colatura make “Americana” music of a different kind that takes the tenets of classic Americana song form but gets all dreampoppy and shoegazey with it (maybe it has something to do with the duo of Jennica & Digo Best having one foot in Pittsburgh–a city best know for its lake once catching on fire due to all the toxic pollution which is pretty damn grungy—and New York City which can be pretty damn grungy too but is also the home to Tin Pan Alley, basically where the modern pop song was invented).
… while leaving room for shimmering indie-laced jangle as well or in the case of “(Every Time I Think About You) It’s About Me” making room for what’s essentially a mid-tempo grunge ballad (think Garbage or Hole obviously) that starts modestly but gets pretty damn grandiose by the end assisted by plenty of noisy flange just building up the wall of sound further as Jennica and Digo lay down some hard truths as they’re wont to do but here with the wit and panche of Cole Porter in the form of a heart-clutching yet self-effacing grunge ballad (btw if it’s not self-effacing, it’s not grunge proper, i.e. Gen-Xers celebrating their own loserdom and by implication the loserdom of all of humanity) of which there are way too few good ones in existence so we consider this song a public service and I bet if Courtney Love ever hears it she’ll threaten to stab Jennica in the face if they don’t let her cover it.
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14) MINAXI is the traditional Hindustani shoegaze psych-rock band that you didn’t know you needed until now cuz one listen and.yr sure to get hooked by their new album Z of A cuz this is a “wooly sweater” album in best way cjuz I mean it’s pretty mesmerizing stuff but it feels pretty cerebral too and if listened to repeatedly has been show to grow hair on parts of your body yr not expecting it to grow (the Minaxi-Minoxidil brand partnership seems like a no-brainer) but what would you expect from a band once described as “OK Computer meets OM Gnesha (mantra-chanting)” which OK we just made that quote up but it’s pretty damn good innit so we’ll take the credit (!) with Z of A being an record with s a credit for both “harmonium textures” and “field recordings” so like we said woody sweater and speaking of squeezeboxes Minaxi takes a page from the Who’s The Who Sell Out with standalone satirical ads plus nature sounds/city soundscapes/distant radio transmission and heavy breathing interspersed between the tracks proper…
…with a fake Spotify-type ad break popping up at the end of track two (“Spinning”) that’s so convincing at first I thought it was real which is a little jarring coming at the end of such an etherial whisper-to-a-scream soaring-violin-and-cello assisted grunge ballad (another one!) that gets the album off to a stirring shifting-up-to-2nd-gear start after opener “Ambient Dilli” which sounds like just it’s title even tho’ we’re not sure what a “Dilli” is and that’s the thing with this record you gotta pull a Timothy Leary, turn off your mind and let it float downstream if yr gonna take this thing in properly cuz what’s “Spinning” is your head as pointed out in the lyrics and depicted further in the music with its whirlpool of swirling textures not to mention the alternating measures of 3/4 and 4/4 spinning you around for all you rhythm nerds out there and for you stoners we recommend a good sativa-Indica hybrid to pair with the album.
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15) WHAT’S THE NEXT CAREER MOVE for a blue-eyed soul-singing 5-foot-3 maybe in high-heels, Kim Novac type if Kim Novak were an R&B belter who’s fully proven her mettle with one brassy, bluesy banger after another over the preceding years and if you’re FIONA SILVER you start a new project called Life On Other Planets that explores radically new sonic terrain while still taking advantage of that voice cuz we’re talking Tangerine Dream meets Roxette meets Nina Hagen meets Lene Lovich meets Cocteau Twins meets Tom Tom Club meets well ok we’re not gonna thrown any more mud at that wall bur brought up to 2025 appropriate standards with dashes of vaporwave and city-pop thrown into the mix…
…and whether the shift is a momentary thing or not with “dreamwaver” in particular, the opening track on LOOP’s debut EP Is There Life On Other Planets,” it sounds like it was custom made for the upcoming Risky Business reboot starring Sydney Sweeney and Caleb McLaughlin so you get the idea or just give it a listen with its chilly-sexy breakbeat and airy swirls of synth, tinkling xylophone, burbling arpeggios, and reverb-heavy production all adding up to a pop narcotic rush that’s blissed-out on its surface but melancholic underneath and if you like all these sides of Fiona then you pro’bly oughta check out her Evil Eyes EP from last September starting with the excellent title track given its mashup of soulful R&B grooves with gothy type textures and a new full-on brunette hairdo to boot which only ups the bloozy, potentially boozy chanteuse ante that’s like the halfway point between the old Fiona and today’s Life On Other Planets version but that’s just our hot take.
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16) SID SIMONS MAY NOT BE YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY Brooklynite-by-way-of-Portland-via-Sydney-via-New-York-City-via-Shanghai, China singer-songwriter expertly churning out everything from sunshine pop to jangly, Baroquely arranged folk-rock to down ‘n’ dirty bluesy boogie-rock with a touch of Madchester strut thrown in for good measure whether of “the Rolling” or “the Roses” variety with Sid and his band going more for the latter on “The Lie” which is the first track propér off his recent half-full-length release, The Last American Valentine, getting the record off to a suitably down ’n’ dirty start with its boogie-rock struct and when the bongos come in you’d be forgiven for swiveling your hips a bit while unbuttoning a button or two on yr fancy dress shirt…
…which carries over to its minimalist yet kinetic music video which sees our frontman and his guitarist cavorting on a sparsely furnished soundstage with Sid making friends with the floor and briefly giving MJ a run for the money in the crotch-grabbing department as he observes that “ever word out of your mouth was a lie / and every lie you looked me right in the eye” which one could interpret as oblique political criticism or simply as the worthy entry in the long line of boogie-rock songs scolding liars, cheaters, and thieves in the realm of the romantic arts that still manage to be highly seductive as well.
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17) We were searching for Willie Nelson’s “Summer of Roses” when we stumbled across VOLENA’s “Summer of Roses” and talk about a happy coincidence cuz not only is Valena a current-day, Brooklyn-based band that’s somehow escaped our notice up until nearly now but also their 2025single “Summer of Roses” released this past April is a deeply groovy tho’ equally hazy even in stripped-down form spaced-out-dub-reggae-meets-space-rock four-and-a-half-minute quiet storm of a song…
…starting off as a gentle waltz that slowly builds ’til the unexpected entrance of some big-sounding power chords before cycling back to the gentler side of things that is until it concludes with a propulsive, jammy coda section like trying to get one last gasp of seli-desperate fun in during the waning days of summer which seem to dissolve even more quickly into the ether the harder we try to grasp on to them and before we know it full-on winter will be here.
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18) ON HER LATEST SINGLE “Go Easy On Me,” SARAH MICHELLE LEE ADDRESSES HERSELF in the mirror’s reflection of her own childhood insecurities as she catalogues some of the ways we routinely beat up on ourselves and pick out each perceived fault whether external or internal or environmental to where it’s me that needs to go easy on me as much or more than anyone else does like how having company stop by unexpectedly will make you suddenly notice every dusty surface, carelessly tossed article of clothing etc. right down to the nearly microscopic food crumbs that accumulated since your last vacuuming, crumbs that you weren’t so concerned about before which is a potent message to deliver in a time when social media makes us ever more self-aware and in fear of feeling inferior so no wonder mental health issues are on the rise to the point where shallow songs of self-love aren’t gonna suffice when it comes to healing those old old wounds (“I recall days on the playground / tripping over my self doubt / why’s it feel the same now?”)…
…but ultimately, thankfully, Sarah comes to realize she shouldn’t be so hard on herself thanks to the poignant observation that when she looks in the mirror and sees her parents and siblings in her own visage, and hears them in her own voice, it naturally leads to the question, “how can I hate what I love about another,” a message conveyed all the more powerfully with a musical backing that sounds as if it was penned by the ghost of a Laurel Canyon songwriter from back in the day or by a certain singer-drummer gifted with an angelic, otherworldly voice who famously struggled with body dysmorphia what with its twinkling strumy/spacey pastoral folk-rock vibes with plaintive swells of ambient sound providing a fitting sonic bed for Sarah’s warm vocal tones to nested atop reminding us that when we spin ourselves into a dizzy, disoriented state of unreliable perceptions the best thing can be to just lie down and let it pass over like in the last scene of the video above.
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19) Not unlike Colatura above but in an entirely different musical realm, SEXUAL PURITY’s “Have You Ever Loved Me?” dares to speak the subtexts out loud of like-minded darkwave songs that take a certain cold comfort in aestheticizing and anaesthetizing their pain by means of making suffering sexy again (print that on a red cap and sell it) with vaguely angsty, downbeat odes to the joys of joylessness cuz really is there a more wickedly sensual piece of music than Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” in existence (we think not!) and not just cuz it was in The Hunger either, songs generally aimed at the vampiric denizens of Batcave-like gothic dance floors favored by patrons with unlimited mascara budgets and loose-fitting blouses with full bishop sleeves which don’t get it twisted we’re all in favor of such things…
…with Sexual Purity stripping away any and all such frippery, all the high romanticism of the New Romantics, in favor of a grinding, minimalist melody repeated over equally grinding, repetitive beats with vocals alternately hissed and whispered menacingly resulting in a kind of simmering mesmeric brutality that sounds like a 45rpm Ministry single played back at 33-1/3 rpm with the duo of Anastasiia Romanova and Oleksii Donets (both Ukrainian-born residents of Chicago so no wonder their music’s bleak yet determined sounding) asking the titular question which lies at the heart of goth’s pull out my heart and feed it to anyone aesthetic and that’s the question of whether you’ve ever been loved or ever can be loved again with each syllable of the song’s titular phrase echoing into a Mount Kilimanjaro-sized abyss of hollowness inside that is until a single distorted guitar chord chimes in ominously near the end along with some synth-tom fills and it’s all oddly beguiling.
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20) FUN-LOVING, MODERNIST POET T.S. Eliot once wrote about the world ending not with a bang but with a whimper but surely there must be more than two options and if the end ended up being soundtracked by ANDREA WITTGENS‘ “House of Heavenly Bodies” we’d take it over a bang *or* a whimper any day, appearing as the penultimate track on Andrea’s epically-scaled most recent full-length Big Dreams Little Earthlings seeing as its one of the most devastating songs about devastation we’re heard in a long minute—a hushed, cataclysmic, waltz-time piano ballad festooned with eerie horror-movie strings and miscellaneous judgment-day ambience as the lyrics unfold a series of fragmentary end-time images both personal and broadly existential with the world cracking apart at the seams (opening lyric: “in the rearview / skeleton tree lines / and explosions in the sky / if I were a believer / I’d take it as a sign”) as the sounds of a far-off war zone steadily draw nearer with lines like “and yeah it’s a little tragic [but[ It’s so beautiful it hurts” acting as a summation of the song itself and its cathartic power…
…all of which perfectly matched to Wittgens’ vocals which occupy a middle ground between airily angelic to the whiskey-soaked rasp of a barfly spilling out their soul like a latter day Marianne Faithfull or like a “human in the house of heavenly bodies” all of which sounds terribly serious and it is at time but consistently leavened by the songs’ frequent mordant sense of humor and flashes of romanticism and wistful nostalgia and playfully kaleidoscopic music (see: “The Twist,” “All the Golden Girls Are Dead,” and “1984” for embodiments of all these qualities) with “House of Heavenly Bodies” again being on the darker side of the moon sonically and lyrically (“How can someone post a photo of a sunrise / and decide to die the same day?) but still never bereft of dark-hued humor (“when you said God was a comedian / was it laughter you needed?”) soaring, ravishing melodies (“so beautiful it hurts“) unbridled longing (“I’d kill for a feeling / but I’m good here in the dirt“) and the bravely confessional directness that makes “H.O.H.B.” and the record as a whole feel so universal.
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21 & 22) SELF-DESCRIBED “DIRTY FUKKIN’ DYKE” BAND BAD STATIC– are about to hop the pond if they haven’t already to play a series of dates in Paris (9/5), London (9/6 at Loud Women Fest), and Kent, England (9/7) alongside fellow sisters in crime T@B GRRL (the 2 band even share 1 member currently, Nicol Maciejewska a.k.a. Nico Mac) all of whom want to make one thing abundantly clear to their fans at home and abroad whether on “Not Yr Doll” put out by Bad Static earlier this year or on T@b Grrrl’s double A-sided single “i love lucy” / “o.f.i.t.” released in early summer, namely:
…1) they are not yr dolls; 2) they have never been yr dolls; and 3) they will never be yr dolls either and while that’s technically three things being made abundant clear it’s with a single-minded purpose and a single-minded sound with both bands rooted in both furious punk stomp and stomping punk fury that’s equal parts anarchic and melodic with vocals chanted jump-rope rhyming style, growled and snarled and delivered “nyah-nyah-nyah” playground taunting style and of course outright screamed and shouted in a deliverately vocal-cord shredding mannyer…
…songs that’re guaranteed to make wanna stomp around furiously in yr Docs or Chucks or barefoot if yr truly savage like a momma grizzly thrusting its pads, paws ‘n’ claws into a shallow stream feed on a school of salmon which of course represents the patriarchy, i.e. the main thing to be stomped out by grrrls “tired of men infantilizing you and turning you into a doll” in the words of Bad Static but don’t get it twisted cuz T@b Grrrl/Bad Static are all about bringing intersectionality to the next wave of riot grrrl, including “girls, gays, and theys,” with “I love lucy” for instance being “about a grrrl who didn’t know how to fucking communicate” acc. to band frontgrrrl Gianna “Gigi” Barwald who entered the culture thru zine writing and publishing first before getting involved with music-making herself…
…and with dark forces amassing on the horizon and in our city streets as we speak it’s extra crucial to communicate and to form communities which is just what t@b grrrl and Bad Static advocate so hard for and again in Gigi’s own words, “It’s more than gender, it’s more than race. It is and always has been about community, and community includes everyone” as quoted in a feature in Huck Mag and one can already see the promise coming to be fulfilled on the NYC scene and beyond with bands like Shaggo, Tits Dick Ass, Pop Music Fever Dream, Eevie Echoes & the Locations, Adult Human Females, Cat Crash, Grrrl Sludge, Film & Gender and many, many others making the dream real (SEE below: pages from Gigi’s first D.I.Y. zine, Hot As Hell).
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23) WETSUIT’s new album Yarn For Future Scarves defies the typical sophomore slump by pushing the levels up on what made their debut Sugar, I’m Tired so appealing, NAMELY, A MIDWESTERN PROCLIVITY FOR PLAINSPOKENNESS AND OPENNESS BUT EQUALLY FOR TORNADIC DISRUPTIONS RESULTING FROM CLASHING WEATHER SYSTEMS while throwing in some new twists as well with lead warbler/wordsmith Allison Becker having been raised in St. Louis so it makes sense their songs are a lot like toasted ravioli—–a dish native to the city—-pleasingly crunchy on the outside after being dipped in egg and breadcrumbs and deep fried or oven baked (not to quibble but “toasted” is a misnomer) while being pleasingly rich and gooey on the inside due to whatever combo of cheeses, minced meats, and veggies make up the ravioli’s filling, resulting in a rich symphony of flavors and textures whether savory, tangy, or possibly spicy and don’t even get us started on the choice of toppings which can range from marinara to heavy, meaty Bolognaise to a light lemon butter cream sauce with peas and roasted asparagus to make yr pee smell funny which OK maybe not “light” exactly but great comfort food nonetheless…
…and likewise biting into your average Wetsuit song has a similar “comfort music” quality to it not unlike biting into one those toasted raviolis but equally complex too in its array of flavors from song to song and within songs with musical textures ranging from crisp, chiming anthemic indie rock (Win “Butter” Butler eat yr heart out!) to hazy shoegazy sonic sludge cresting into tsunami-like walls of sound depending upon how axeman Anders Nils weaves together his effects pedal “signal chain” at any given moment not unlike (switching metaphors here!) Allison’s love for crocheting scarves, sweaters, and beer bottle cozies using similar to how she utilizes how own vocal chords as a “yarn” of sorts, twisted into unusual shapes ranging from gentle lullaby-like cooing to hard glottal stops and Banshee wails and rapid flips between head voice and chest voice etc. (call what she does “yodeling” if you must but there’s much more going on there, just listen to “John Mulaney” tho’ his Netflix show is fairly hit n’ miss) and what with all of Wetsuit’s artsy-craftiness they’re easily the most Etsy-ready band on the scene and why they’re not selling band doilies or cat sweater merch yet we’re not quite sure…
…with the LP’s titular phrase finally showing up on the album-closing “The Fog”, also its longest gestating song first conceived in 2020, a song that opens with a brown-noise drone reminiscent of the mystical coastal fog the Scots call Haar known for shrouding the seaside landscape in sublime, eerie fashion but then the fog lifts with Allison’s voice dissipating the mist like the first rays of the morning sun with the the song sitting in this idyllic idyll for a couple minutes yoked to a steady heartbeat on bass guitar all the while gradually building up and up until the song reaches full-on escape velocity near the end and lifts off into a spine-tingling mantra-like repetition of “floating.. floooating.. FLOATING… FLOOOATING!!!” before coming back down to earth in a soft landing stripped down to the heartbeat pulse again and a bit more brown noise before quickly fading out but hey that was quite a moment of clarity achieved between the fog rolling out and then back in and if you have yr stream set to repeat it’ll loop back to “Cider” (a song about how great summer in NYC is—more comforting comfort food!), a song with a line about how “The Deli smells of cat piss” which truth be told we don’t even own a cat but we’ll let the poetic license slide.
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24) SPEAKING OF SONGS LIKELY TO INDUCE ASCENSION we next turn to singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer-painter-poet ASI KEMERA who’s made her way to Brooklyn (at least sporadically) via Atlanta and LA and who knows where else but as Asi’s stated elsewhere it was being brought up in “hella diverse” Atlanta that exposed her to styles of music like Japanese city pop, Ethiopian jazz, and Bollywood soundtracks that she’s all of which it could be argued have at least a kind of quasi-spiritual quality to them if not outright spiritualism that while not necessarily having to do with religion explicitly does have to do with transporting the listener to an otherwise obscured alternative realm of consciousness…
…but why should you take our word for it when people who don’t write run-on sentences have had similar insights like in the comments left on a clip of her latest single “have you seen her?” posted on instagram with comments like “love this makes me feel like a floating angel” and “this song makes me ascend” and “❤️❤️❤️❤️” so if you need uplift you may wanna give it a listen and see if it lifts you into another, higher realm too with lyrics like “after dark when i last had her in my view, view, view” [with] a floating cigarette she pulled from underneath her shoe shoe, shoe” only upping the trippiness quotient further with imagery that sounds like it’s out of a Hayao Miyazaki describing one of his mystical feminine heroines but we’ll leave you to draw your own associations and inferences.
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25) For the record, we’re convinced that if the 1980 film XANADU WHICH WAS A NOTORIOUSLY BIZARRE, MISGUIDED FLOP OF A FILM THAT HELPED KILL THE LIVE-ACTION MOVIE MUSICAL FOR TWO DECADES SOLID UNTIL Moulin Rouge came along were rebooted properly it could be a money-printing cash windfall mega-hit (granted we’ve never sat thru more than 30 minutes of the original movie in one sitting cuz we ain’t no masochist but no matter!) especially if we had the help of the creative team behind bringing Cats to the big screen (digital butthole removal machine!) with it being (not to point fingers) the artist known as PISHA who has convinced us of this fact—a point we’ll return to shortly—with the “plot” of Xanadu centered on a depressed, struggling LA photographer stuck in a dead-end, low-status job in the LP-cover artwork-making racket (!) but once he gets a load of Olivia Newton-John roller-skating down the Santa Monica Pier his imagination is reignited and his soul restored (RIP ONJ)…
….and later thru some sleuthing he learns that she’s actually the Greek goddess Terpsichore (!!) who’s the Muse of Song and Dance but who instead of helping Mr. Photographer w/his artistic aspirations inexplicably convinces him to open a roller disco rink at great personal expense w/octogenarian dance legend Gene Kelly (!!!) which leads to numerous bizarre and bizarrely incongruous musical numbers and we don’t even know what happens after that tho’ we assume ONJ is revealed in reality to be an LA wharf rat faking an Australian accent who dosed the protagonist’s Dr. Pepper in order to scam him out of his meager savings which would at least explain why he sees light trails whenever she’s skating…
…anyway the main reason people even remember the movie is its remarkably trippy soundtrack for a movie that was supposed to be the new Grease but which scored a few major chart hits thanks to Jeff Lynne’s pop songwriting and arranging skills and ONJ’s but really it was pretty damn avant-garde back then and still is now, bridging the gap between Futuristic Space Disco For Roller Rinks and Acid Flashback World War II-era Tap Dance Numbers inspired by the Andrews Sisters and be forewarned viewing this film will make you question your sexual identity among other things due to its high “high camp” quotient…
…and if anyone could pull off this vibe today we’d nominate the aforementioned Pisha who are very own Willa a.k.a. November Girl has written up a couple times cuz for starters she can already roller skate as demonstrated in the video clip for her new song “Who You Really Are” which comes complete with bleep-bloopy chillwavey keyboards and beats as PISHA skates across a neon-lit stretch of asphalt (“put one foot in front of the other”) minus the grandiosity and confusion brought to bear by coked out Hollywood producers for according to no less than Pisha themself this is a song “about transition, acceptance, reflection, and the end of summer..and rollerskating of course!!”…
and if you were gonna make a DIY, low-budget version of Xanadu complete with VCR artifacts then Pisha’s dreamy if not outright faded musical aesthetic would be perfect for it with a good chunk of the video shot in the same city park where Pisha herself has described going to late at night to skate off nervous energy and everyday worries and insecurities which is really far more relatable than falling for a roller-skating Greek goddess from Australia (“I’m not scared anymore / does love really ever have a plan“) so let’s get a production team together pronto and storyboard this thing then wait for the millions to roll in cuz as Pisha sing-speaks at the song’s end: “the future is calling”…
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26) According to Google’s AI, Gemini, Bull’s Blood is the name given to an heirloom beet variety known for its VIBRANT, DARK RED-PURPLE LEAVES AND ROOTS said to be “excellent in salads” but then again just about anything’s “excellent in salads” besides more lettuce or alfalfa sprouts but we digress—also given to a brand of Hungarian wine named for the soldiers who drank real bull’s blood before going into battle—looking to absorb some of the brute animal’s strength which even if it worked as a placebo that’s something—also given to an online brand of performance enhancement supplements surely available at all yr finer gas stations and truck stops and sketchier corners of the Internet everywhere …
…and then lastly its the name given to the one-woman band (tho’ joined by bandmates when called for live) comprised solely of multi-instrumentalist and record producer Hillary Lahoma Van Scoy who moved here from Glasgow a few years back with Blood of the Bull’s post-move debut EP When I Speed Up (Substitute Scene Records) giving this listener a bigger bump of energy and new strength than heirloom roots, Hungarian wine, and dicey truck-store boner pills combined and while we love some of the titles from BotB’s first phase like “Bend Over,” “You Are My Favorite Communist,” and ”Hold Your Head Up High And Go Fuck Yourself”—this is exactly how people in Glasgow talk if the movie Trainspotting is to be believed so it’s good to have it confirmed—we’re even more fond of the new songs like the title track cuz it’s a sleek power-pop machine of churning guitars, distant bells, yearning melodies, and cool-breezy singing that’ll have you reaching for your Harley-Davidson or your Vespa LX just to feel the wind blowing thru your hair as you speed down the highway [editor’s note: wear a helmet, kids!] blasting the tune on groovy pair of over the ear ‘phones but do it quick cuz Fall fast approaches, FFO bands along the lines of the Black Angels or LA Witch…
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27) SPEAKING OF TRAUMATIC HEAD INJURIES, one should always heed CAITLIN STARR‘s sage advice to Hold On Tight, a directive she issued back in March of this year in the form of her debut EP and still it hits quite nicely so we really don’t care if it came out 6 days ago or 6 months ago or 6 years ago or, well, you get the idea and indeed the warning’s not issued in vain cuz this is the kinda record that music theorists refer to as “a real rollercoaster ride” as she pumps your ears full of one shot of adrenaline after another starting right from the introductory track, “Take Me Down,” which spends its first 26-27 seconds slowly rounding the bend to the first big climb (“don’t need your help / I’d rather be / all by myself / a tragedy / that’s why I fell / for gravity“) and then at about 53 seconds you start to feel butterflies in your stomach just seeing how high up in the air and close to the first big drop you are and start to feel the racing downward momentum as the first cars reach the peak which hits just as Caitlin belts out the refrain of “take me down / take me down“…
…which having seen Caitlin Starr play live a few times (including at the Deli Mag Fair back in April or May it’s all such a blur now!) we can assure you the extended metaphor continues to hold cuz if anything the music hurls you around even a little more violently and thrillingly as Caitlin and her band seems to swing back and forth between self-annihilation and total slayage of anyone or anything in their immediate vicinity and what’s more making you beg for it as they swallow your soul (“spit me out in agony / please don’t make time for me / I just can’t take the irony / so why don’t you die for me“)…
photo by Tyler Bertram
…cuz we’re seen ’em live a few times now and we’ve figured out the key to “getting” Caitlin and Co. is watching her take a guitar solo cuz yeah the grrrl can really shred but she doesn’t do it in typical Guitar Hero-y fashion, in fact just the opposite, where rather than standing astride her ax in mock heroic fashion cuz half the time it’s like she’s folding in our herself, overtaken by some inner or outer demonic force or even by the guitar itself, channeling notes from another dimension that sends her careening about the stage and into her bandmates who’re doing their own share of careening as if they’re sliver balls in a KISS pinball machine that just went into multi-ball mode which prob’ly helps accounts for Caitlin’s overall breathy, woozy vocals and audible gasps and signs still keeping their collective composure enough to keep reeling in the audience with one sharp hook after another and waves of sugar-coating noise as bait.
28) SPEAKING OF SHARP HOOKS AND WAVES OF SUGAR-COATED NOISE, FRIDA KILL’s new single “Therapy” just came out a week ago but already we’re having dreams about it, or to be a little more accurate, we were so into the song when it came out last weekend that we put it on for a final spin, metaphorically speaking (while not available on vinyl yet, you can pre-order it here with “Therapy” serving as the lead-off single off the Kill’s upcoming City Gurl LP slated for release November 7th) before turning in for the “night” or more like wee hours of the morning and let’s just say we’d enjoyed some libations earlier in the evening and as a result collapsed onto the couch with the song on repeat and falling asleep after we’d listened to it with a still-conscious mind a couple time which to be clear the song’s very much the opposite of sleep-inducing even if the singsongy vocal melody is a bit hypnotizing but no matter cuz after enough Negronis I could fall asleep to a supersonic jet landing on the roof…
…so anyway we slept a solid couple of hours with “Therapy” chugging along on repeat, sawing logs despite the boppiness of its chord progression and the overall punky buoyancy of the performance with Jeanette D. Moses (not only a singer/guitarist but also a photographer extraordinaire on the local scene) singing lines like, “I’ll never sleep / I’ll never sleep” (true, sometimes at least) and “sometimes I cry so hard / I cannot breath” and “I miss the one you were before / I miss the one you were before” (apologies if we’re misinterpreting any of the words which we’ll attempt to confirm!) but here’s the cool thing is that the song actually induced a dream with yours truly attended a live-band karaoke night where even tho’ the band only knew one song (guess which one?!?) no one cared and in fact everyone loved it, going up on stage to sing Frida Kill and comparing all the different renditions, finally waking up, as if on cue, towards the end of my own performance as the audience cheered me on and how’s that for crowd participation not to mention “dream pop” that both rocks you to sleep and rocks you awake with a free therapy session in between.
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29) AND IF YOU WANNA TALK MESMERIZING MUSIC WE SUGGEST YOU GIVE WATER FROM YOUR EYES’ “LIFE SIGNS” A CLOSE LISTEN cuz just from the song’s first minute or so yr likely to become fully mesmerized and highly suggestible as it opens with a slithery, descending guitar line in rapid 5/4 time serving as a sort of ostinato with a second guitar art coming in with an even shorter, more repetitive arpeggiation in a rhythmic cycle of 3 or 4 (we think it’s the latter but the tempo’s so dang fast!) which given that the two parts don’t fit together symmetrically creates a sense of the ground constantly shifting beneath your feet but yet it’ll make you wanna dance as a means of reconciling the beats using your own body or at least to sway deeply pensively in place…
…and if we had the time, space, or energy we could attempt a crazy, extended musical analysis cuz the there’s about 20 or 30 other different melodies and rhythmic lines and loops, squiggles and squelches coming in at different parts- ranging from heavy Big Muff wall-of-sound power chords to introspective, cerebral math rock-y bits to a refrain that sounds like it was lifted from a Brazilian Tropicália song but with backmasked guitar and plenty of other bonkers bits besides so we recommend you just lay back and float downstream as you listen and rest assured if we’re barely able to scrape the surface of this one song here then we’re only barely scraping the surface of the surface of the LP it’s taken from entitled It’s A Beautiful Place which is exactly where this extremely dynamic duo has ended up on it’s third full-length release…
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31) SPEAKING OF GOING TO BEAUTIFUL PLACES the latest single by DIGAMY takes the listener to one especially if that listener happens to be frontman David Guevara’s son, a point which we’ll return to in a second but for now suffice to say with the sun coming up as we write or more literally type this I’ll damn well ready to follow DIgamY into the light of a new day which is exactly what it sounds like on their new song “Save Yourself” which opens w/a reversed fade-in like a new day breaking followed by some nice chiming harmonics on guitar and other swirly bits setting a fizzy-headed vibe it’s all held down ‘n’ anchored by a heavy fuzzed-out bass groove and some savage skin-pounding tub-thumping riddims that’d do Chad Smith proud so it actually makes sense when Dave start rap-rocking like it’s 1999 and hey why not cuz it’s about time we bring this (no complaints here!) endless ’90s revival up to the late ’90s at least or up to the early naughty naughts even…
…and while at a certain point as the song progresses you may be tempted to say yo, stop tryin to son me, son! it’ll all make a lot more sense when you know that David actually wrote this song addressed to and for the benefit of his actual teenage son and don’t you wish you had a Cool Dad who was cool enuf to observe and admit that “it’s kind of funny how we play the game / thinking that we know it’s name” cuz most dads are way too insecure in their manhood to admit to anything like the futility of it all but while still holding out room for hard-won hope and barring hard-won hope for unconditional support at the very least and that’s all most teens need to hear from their Dads after all is that they “want to know what will it take to bring you peace” or as David Guevara himself put in across a couple Insta posts which again is very cool dad of him:
Some moments remind you what really matters. This is one of them. Not the stage lights or the noise, but the quiet chaos at home—my son surrounded by cats, laughing like the world’s weight isn’t on his shoulders. I write songs for nights like this, and for days when it all feels too heavy. “Save Yourself” came from that place—a song about finding strength when no one else can do it for you. If you’ve ever needed that reminder, it’s yours now” while at the same time “[the song is] for anyone who’s been at the edge, staring down their own reflection and wondering if they can pull themselves back. It’s loud, gritty, and unapologetic because sometimes that’s what it takes to break through the noise in your head.”
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32) SPEAKING OF BREAKING THRU THE NOIZE IN YR HEAD we’re spent the past several years watching as CASTLE RAT mature and develop their now fully-formed doom-meets-D&D-loving-power-metal Goddess of Thunder attack with its onslaught not only of alternately-sludgy-and-pristine sonics but also a fully-formed universe featuring a mythologically attuned cast of heroes and villains who don’t skimp on the cool costumery including The Plague Doctor, The All-Seeing Druid, The Dagger Dragger, the ever mysterious Count, and of course The Rat Reaperess doing battle not with glory-holed hunks of cheddar cheese but with riffs and spells and swords of both the cold, steely variety and of the verbal variety (go listen to GZA’s Liquid Swords stat if you don’t know it already!) rather than your traditional rat poisons…
…with a song like “WIZARD,” the latest single from the band’s upcoming sophomore full-length The Bestiary (King Volume Records), clearly understanding that both our deepest fears and deepest fantasies tend to dwell in the darker walled-off corners of our psyche and whether confronted with a rat or a wizard one only gains the upper hand by understanding the voluptuous horror of these dynamics (in them, in us) and not letting fear, superstition, intimidation, nor a deep-seated musophob get the better of ya with songwriting being a great way of cultivating the mindfulness needed to conquer these realms–both internal and external, as if there’s any difference–bringing to light these shadowy netherworlds and their shadowy denizens as any good therapist would advise you to…
Oh, WIzard, the magic you’re wielding / I can see it’s power / I can see what you’re shielding / within you a creature is feeling / I can see it cower / Have you strength for healing?
Painting by @bellakroeart
…and when it comes to the voluptuous horror of Riley Pinkerton—the mastermind behind the Realm, not to discount the contributions of Castle Rat’s consummate-pro bandmates, e.g., Franco Vittore: The Count, Lead Guitar; Charley Ruddell: The Plague Doctor, Bass; Josh Strmic The Druid, Drums; heavy metal warriors all—it appears that RP peered deep within and effected a personal transformation, which isn’t to say her earlier guitar-strumming, folkie-type material wasn’t just as raw and confrontational in its own way, simply a matter of adapting the medium to the message with audiences responding in kind w/Castle Rat moving steadily from smaller clubs to bigger venues like Le Poisson Rouge and Bowery Ballroom–and while more than one commentator has compared Riley’s warrior princess alter-ego to a Frank Frazetta illustration come to life (more than valid!)…
…for our purposes the Rat Queen is less a purely fantasy figure and more a flesh-and-blood manifestation of the fantasy (let’s be real) we’ve all had about pushing back against the bastards constantly trying to grind us down whether from afar or from intimately close by not to mention the internal mental blocks stopping us from doing just that just like in some campy yet strangely motivating revenge-based action movie with one great example being Linda Blair in 1984’s Savage Streets (Pinkerton’s spirit animal as far as we’re concerned!) in which the former vessel of Satan plays a leather-clad, poodle-permed angel of vengeance who leads her high school’s girl gang (the Satans) who’re really pretty chill for a girl gang in a sustained campaign of vengeance after the leader of the rival guy gang (The Scars) rapes Linda’s deaf-mute sister (it was the ’80s) played by none other than Linnea Quigley and let’s just say Linda goes back and buys that Chekhov’s crossbow from the first scene, letting loose on all the slimy dudes and Valley gals who’ve also f—ed with her on the regular with a winking glee that’s positively infectious.
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33) AND FINALLY, SPEAKING OF POSITIVELY INFECTIOUS, WE COME TO LORD FRIDAY THE 13TH who just put out their debut full-length a couple weeks ago called Promoerotica–a band we first heard (of) when they opened for none other than Castle Rat over two years ago (?!?) at Elsewhere (not the big hall, but the smaller space at the otherwise cavernous venue) but pretty immediately we were blown away cuz no less than Castle Rat it felt like here’s a band that belongs on a bigger stage cuz just by convincingly projecting themselves as larger-than-life they made that small stage grew three sizes that night and so it feels pretty apropos that in the intervening years LFT13th has relocated from Austin to LA for in true DOLLAR STORE TRASH-GLAM-PUNK BAND fashion here’s a rock band fascinated with the mechanics of fame—and by association identity-formation more broadly which side-note the band is led by the sibling pair of Felix & Sloane Lenz who were in large part “raised as twins” despite a two-year age difference—with a clearly stated mission statement of achieving it themselves all while relentlessly deconstructing its inner workings…
…and no wonder they’ve got a song called “St. Judy” off an early EP that’s all about Judy Garland with the iconic actress getting a name check on the new LP’s title track too seeing as perhaps no other figure has represented the evolution of fame thru the 20th century quite so movingly, moving from the vaudeville stage to The Wizard of Oz and the studio system, from A Star Is Born and its depiction of stardom as a destructive force to major successes on the concert stage and the boob tube with Judy leaving her mark on every major medium for who else is synonymous with both Carnegie Hall and Hollywood in equal measure while also helping pioneer the image of the boozy pill-popping True Hollywood Story and Behind the Music episode wrapped into one (surviving and ultimately thriving) long before tales of celebrity dysfunction and trauma got to be as crucial to the entertainment industry as celebrity itself…
…and as if that wasn’t enough, even Judy’s death turned out to be a cultural touchstone, credited by some for being the “patron saint” of the Stonewall Riots at a bar known for catering to “punks” in the old-school sense that kicked off the Gay Liberation Movement with grieving patrons of the bar harassed by police and deciding enough was enough and fighting back which is where Lord Friday the 13th come back into the picture given their self-stated determination to “challenge gender roles and conformity…to empower and inspire a new kind of punk for a new world” while bringing plenty of glam to the picture given the theatrical tenor of their songs and performances alongside plenty of insouciance wit and really it’s pretty goddamn punk to write a song about being hot for an older Catholic clergymen as they have on the new LP’s “Hot For Preacher” (“He’s a hostile pentecostal who just turned 43 / but when I see that apostle I just know what he needs / put some hustle in his bustle / get him down on his knees“)…
…but we’re here to talk, however briefly, about the song “Promoerotica” which swings and grinds away in equal proportion like T.Rex on Adderall with Felix capturing the notion of celebrity as both opiate and quagmire (“So basically I love a red carpet / especially this close to the La Brea Tar Pit“) as the song winds its way thru buzzsaw grooves and start-stop dynamics and a funky-basslined breakdown section, bookended by the sounds of pleading paparazzi and popping flashbulbs trying to catch that perfect upskirt pic to sell to the tabloids, all the while waxing nostalgic re: “the glamor of times bygone” whilst noting “nothing’s platonic when it’s your job to be seen” complete with a concluding delcaration: “I’m the Lone Star Starlet / I’m the Hollywood harlot / promoerotic / let’s go”…
…and let’s go indeed cuz promotion can somehow be made to be erotic again minus the po-faced self-seriousness/profit motive of the modern-day influencers who opened this magnum dopus plus gleefully absurd and self-effacing and dare we say fun instead cuz as LFT13th charitably reminds us “erotic” rhymes with “chaotic” then maybe there’s hope The Deli will still be around for another 20 yrs that is assuming ‘Merica hasn’t self-immolated by that time nor NYC slidden off into the sea…
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P.S. We were unable to pull off proper photo credits for most of the photos and collages above due to the mammoth nature of this post but fret not cuz we grabbed most the images off the artist’s IG pages which make any credited credits pretty easy to find if so desired…