Tracks of Note: 5/28/2026

Effluence, Container, housekeeping

May 28, 2026

Photo by 徐平 Ping Xu, Cover Design by 洪郡崎 Hung Jiun Chi

Remember when I used to post these regularly? Had some jams with a looming expiration date piling up, and it’s going to be a bit before another ROTD is ready, so here we go. Four-sentence limit. Let’s get blurbing.

Effluence - “Endogenous Polypharmaceutical Communion Rite Of The Oracular Virgin Priestess”

A 35-minute, four-part suite of primo Effluensanity that sounds like Brodequin busting through the practice space wall of the Art Ensemble of Chicago — think if Aerosmith on ayahuasca crashed Run-DMC raising hell with cenobites and threw up. Matt Stephens, the California brutal death boundary pusher’s caretaker, announced the long-awaited, much-delayed Anticholinergic Derangement with a Bandcamp dispatch blessed with the following headline: “JESUS MOTHERFUCKING CHRIST IT’S ALIVE.” You get why Stephens let loose that celebratory exhale as soon as you sink into the album’s colossal centerpiece, which is the most experimental Effluence has been since Sarmat, while also being the project’s most musically coherent statement despite its many strata of supreme bugfuckery. “Endogenous Polypharmaceutical Communion Rite Of The Oracular Virgin Priestess” applies the avant-everything approach of the related Tantric Bile to a concept “inspired by the work of Dr. Ammon Hillman,” the author who suggested that the culture, society, and political machinations of Greco-Roman antiquity were heavily influenced by drugs — fertile ground for a band that has earned its psychedelic associations over the years.

Sister Ghost - “Embers”

Your author is fresh off a mini-marathon of Juliana Hatfield and Tracy Bonham, so stumbling upon Sister Ghost’s newest EP, Oracle, felt like kismet. At its best, and “Embers” is its best, Oracle mines that era when you could write a bright pop song with big guitars before grunge curdled into its post-peak, sundowning mode of dreary solipsism. The Irish purveyor of “Spectral Grunge-pop,” per her bio, proves that the rockin’ melodicism of Velocity Girl still has legs in 2026. And “Embers” subject matter is similarly timeless, dealing with the ‘right person, wrong time’ emotional quagmire, when a broken heart wants to be patched by the past, but reclaiming the present is the only way forward.

J.C. Thomaz and the Missing Slippers - “Cheat R Bad”

You know you’re in for something special when Slovenly Recordings admits up front that “it’s been a minute since we’ve lost our collective shit to a band like ‘this.’” “Cheat R Bad,” the self-titled debut LP from these raunchy Rotterdammers, is a hell of a teaser of “this” in all senses, immediately making good on the, ahem, suggestive cover art. The song is Crampsified garage rock, reeking of the musk of spilled beer, blood, and sweat, but it has a twilight giddiness, a crepuscular carnality, that is like the id reveling in the impending naughtiness. The rest of the song titles are intriguing, and perhaps provide some GPS coordinates for the sleaze: “My Cocaine,” “Unchained Insanity,” “Shit on the Street,” — and, hey, maybe Slovenly’s reaction is responsible for that last one.

Gadget - “Violently Silent”

“Violently Silent” is the fitting closer to Coerced, Gadget’s newest, back-from-the-ashes EP. Instead of the sharp ‘n’ speedy Swedegrind the band is known for, this mid-paced bruiser is much closer to something like the It’s Me God-era of Breach, when that metalcore band laid down the kind of sludgy churn that became bedrock for many Euro chugsters. It’s very grindCORE instead of GRINDcore, complete with This is Hardcore Fest-ready BLECHS from singer Emilia Henriksson that’ll set any mosh in motion. It’s great, and if Gadget wants to make this stylistic shift a full-time gig, I am game.

Operelly - “Under My Bed”

Man, “Under My Bed” would’ve gone off on ‘90s alt-rock FM stations. Like Sister Ghost, California’s Operelly has a pensive hookiness that would’ve enchanted playlist programmers when they were friendlier to femininity before the masculinity-poisoned post-grunge nadir of culture — tell me this song wouldn’t be the natural comedown after a biting Poe banger to end a rock block before a traffic update. Granted, “Under My Bed” has vacation homes in different eras: an electropop tweeness that is more in line with the early ‘00s, along with Operelly’s vocals that tilt toward that modern indie aesthetic of cherubic angst. But, jeez, these layered melodies are money, nailing the haunting atmosphere of Rob Crow when he’s in that ‘”Greensleeves” for the sad and mistake-prone’ mood.

Dope Purple & Kawabata Makoto - “Dope Purple Haze (Cosmic Noisedelia)”

Well, hello, Kawabata Makoto. The Taipei noisy psych rock troop hasn’t hit for me yet, lacking the fuzz pedal madness that other amplifier immolators use to pry open your third eye. Guest astro-traveler Makoto, the shredder in Acid Mothers Temple and Mainliner, certainly helps stoke the fires, turning up the violence of the LSD-infused feedback — a state that was perhaps aided by PEDs: “Before the performance, Kawabata Makoto downed half a bottle of 118-proof Kinmen Kaoliang,” Dope Purple guitarist Kozma Liu wrote in the liner notes. If anyone would like to sneak a few copies of this LP onto US soil, I have a bottle of Kinmen Kaoliang waiting for you.

DIÄT - “Youth Of Neukölln”

Similar to what Slovenly said about J.C. Thomaz, I guess you’ve got to pay attention when Iron Lung Records writes something like “...this LP is your best shot at hearing one of the greatest bands do the thing they were born to do.” Well, OK, I’m kindly requesting that this LP doesn’t sell out before my payday comes around again. I missed the DIÄT buzz the first time around — the Berlin trio got lost in the shuffle of the 2010s spate of tougher post-punk bands that I sorted in my head as “oh, you mean like Total Control?” That said, it makes sense that the stage was DIÄT’s natural environment, and “Youth Of Neukölln” is a fantastic proof-of-concept, drawing out more of the band’s moody darkness and dour loudness.

Slash Need - “Money”

Love that whenever a band covers Fang’s immortal “The Money Will Roll Right In,” the requisite citation for Boner Records, which belonged to Fang drummer Tom Flynn, will be there — the Tom Joad for bands that sound like how a sinus infection feels. Sonically, Slash Need, a techno punk duo from Toronto, isn’t a fit for Boner, but it sure has the strident snottiness of much of the roster. With the kind of noise-complaint-baiting thump that’ll get a venue shut down by NIMBYs, along with slashing guitars so sharp they’d slice through the sole of the thickest platform boot, “Money” is pretty much what I always expected the ‘90s NIN descendants to sound like. It’s an absolute scorcher of a song that’ll inspire the special sickos among my subscribers to find some electronics to torture.

Container - “Drooper”

Absolute filth. From what I can glean from the liner notes, Yacker, the album from which “Drooper” is pulled, is Container’s “rock music” set, deriving inspiration from “the Nirvana song ‘Oh, The Guilt,’ the Mindflayer album It’s Always 1999, and the Rah Bras song ‘Sooop Toe Pump Girls’”. Against all odds, the electronic “Drooper” makes sense as a descendant of all three because there’s a rock brawniness present, mainly because Ren Schofield, Container’s sole employee behind the ruckus, is all about laying out listeners with some absolute ass-beater riffs. If you remember Pound, which was basically Car Bomb if it lost its smarts by juicing itself to the gills on Tren, this track is pretty much the UK “noise techno” version of that, which means, yes, I am now on the hunt for more of whatever noise techno is.

Kristian Olsson - “Valdemars söndervittrande i nordanvinden”

Shout-out to Cody Drasser and Rennie Resmini for putting this Swedish frightfest into my feed. You may have thought you were safe after a few blogs in a row where I tried to write more intelligently, but nope, I’m dragging you and your healthy ears back into noise hell once again. That said, Genfärd‘s industrial clanks and radio static whirrs have a lot more going on than the usual assaultive HNW I let drip into these pages like xenomorph blood. The patience, not to mention the comfort with negative space, of Kristian Olsson’s compositions remind me more of, say, Nurse with Wound or Namanax at their more meditative, taking their time to tease out the maximum amount of dread that’ll make you wish you’d never played this before bed. (Relatedly, Cloister’s CD pressing of Genfärd seems like one of those super creative packages — “pro-printed CD accompanied with a 16 page A5 booklet in Ziploc bag” — that turns into a nightmare when you try to figure out where to put it in the CD rack. I’m still trying to get over Jute Gyte bringing back DVD cases. Weird art rocks, but consider the digipak, please.)

Housekeeping

Unless I’m struck by the increasingly rare lightning bolt of motivation, it’s going to be a bit before ROTD returns. The next post up will likely be the Q2 recap.
That Q2 recap will include a rundown of concerts I’ve attended in the first half of the year. A tasting pour:
Vinyl Williams @ Gold-Diggers, 1/17/2026
I believe I’m on record saying that I’d follow Vinyl Williams into Hell to hear him play bass. That hell is parking in Hollywood, apparently. (I’ll offer the PSA again: Save yourself the headache, dump the car down Gower, and walk — trust me.) LA’s preeminent purveyor of psych that sounds like a warped VHS tape, turned Gold-Diggers into something like a living lenticular, layering these shimmering sheets of tones that moved like clouds over gently proggy nostalgia. The set had some new tunes, but Williams also dug deep into the bag for “Aphelion,” a song I thought he had stopped playing because only one person on the planet could tackle the demanding drum pattern. A closing note: I’ll break my self-imposed blurb length restrictions and go a couple more sentences longer to write that I sat by the merch table for 45 minutes waiting for Williams to return, and the regular bar patrons looked at me like I was a poor baby bird that fell out of the nest — no Polyhaven for me, I guess.
Caitlin Canty @ McCabe’s, 1/24/2026
Fifty people packed into a cozy room with just as many guitars hanging on the walls, and each instrument’s wooden resonator harmonized a response to whatever call came from the stage. Idyllic, ideally, but Caitlin Canty descended the McCabe’s stairs during one of the darker hours of modern American history. And thus began the group therapy: We all worked through it, with the Vermont folk singer’s “Where is the Heart of My Country” doing a lot more of the heavy lifting than was probably intended when it was composed. Still, it was Canty’s songs about the small things — community and the living that still happens even when life gets in the way — that helped the healing, particularly those chronicling her motherhood. Refuse and resist oppressive powers, but don’t forget to bloom where you’re planted.
Anything else you want to see? Lemme know. I don’t want to set myself up for self-fulfilling failure, but this blog was easy enough.