Tracks of Note: Favorite 2025 Not Metal Albums So Far
And Ozzy thoughts, other stuff
I don't have any other writing projects in the pipeline, and my off-and-on summer fling with writer's block means I really don't want to write anything anyway. But we've got to do this, and we might as well do it here.
I was scrolling through Bluesky and saw someone posted "Changes." That's how I found out Ozzy Osbourne died, and that's how I'll always think of the song now. Appropriately poetic, and it felt right hearing it from another metalhead, just like how most of us who weren't alive for Black Sabbath's original run heard about the band in the first place.
Right now, the emotions...they are...complex. On the one hand, Ozzy lived a full life and was able to end his music career on his own terms, at a farewell concert, receiving the honor that many artists don't: actually experiencing the love and appreciation of the many they inspired. That life was outsized. Ozzy was a ceaselessly magnetic personality, the rare legendary metal musician who had actual legends attributed to them, yarns retold like the tales of a modern Paul Bunyan, if Paul Bunyan pissed on the Alamo or snorted a line of ants. As if that wasn't enough, the outpouring of remembrances substantiates that Ozzy was a genuinely good guy. He also, you know, compiled an incredible discography. There's no way my life would have taken the path it did if not for Black Sabbath and Ozzy's early solo work. All of that should be celebrated. All of that feels so self-evident that I don't know why I'm even writing it. For he was a jolly good fellow. Goddamnit, was he ever.
But, jeez, today also feels...I don't know. I don't know because I've never known my heavy metal life without Ozzy. Black Sabbath is so entwined with the culture that I don't actually remember the first time I heard it. It was just there, a fact of life, elemental, like dirt, like rocks, like the sun rising and setting. I'm sure there's a time when you didn't know the rain, and then it rained, and you were like, "What the hell is happening?" But after that, you were like, "Oh, yeah, it's raining, just big droplets of water falling from the sky, totally normal." That's my relationship with Ozzy and Sabbath: this thing that I sometimes take for granted because it has always been there, which is actually insane and incredible.
I could go on all day about Black Sabbath; at this moment, I'm listening to this shitty greatest hits collection I bought when I was 10, and, despite playing it so much over the years I'm surprised it hasn't shattered into a million pieces in my CD player, I still get the shivers when I hear the, you guessed it, rain in "Black Sabbath." (The comp itself is an odd duck. The compilers burned a track on "Laguana Sunrise," which, fine, but how about, like, "Snowblind," you dorks?) However, I really want to focus on Ozzy and his incredible musical magic.
For example, take Ozzy's voice. No one can imitate that thing, not even you, Count Raven. If someone even attempted that idiosyncratic keening cry at karaoke for "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!," or something, you'd ask the bartender if they could cut them off. But Ozzy utilized it perfectly, slicing through Black Sabbath's fuzz and thunder. In a time when popular music was still figuring out how to impart evil, Ozzy was no cartoon character. That air raid siren voice that sounded uncannily like the air raid siren in "War Pigs" wasn't a devil in a red suit twirling the stray strands of a Van Dyke beard. No, it was the scream of bodies caught in the gears of systemic destruction, the casualty-rich byproduct of true evil. It was dark. It was real. And that realness would only get more real on ballads, when Ozzy would turn that scream into a lachrymose cry, a heart-piercing tone that would engender Stax-quality pathos, and often, comfort. Some might say he was successful at both feats because he knew his limitations. Hm, I don't know. I'd call it versatility, the sound of a man who knew every quadrant of the contours of his own voice, and the Prince of Darkness used that power to exude this otherworldly sense of pure presence. Moreover, he was a keen technician. He's always in the right place at the right time, a skill he'd further develop in his solo career to become an outrageously effective hooksmith. This is a guy who got me, a fifth grader, to sing about Perry Mason in 1995. God tier.
It's no surprise, then, that I hear Ozzy's voice in my head all the time. "Flying High Again" was an ever-present earworm when I was getting high, the maniacal, corvid-caw hook of Infectious Groove's "Therapy" loops every time I'm in therapy. That stickiness doesn't happen by accident. It almost seems like Ozzy's earthly purpose was to create indelible memories, either for music nerds like me, those in the thrall of reality shows, or anyone catching a zinger during any of his charismatic interview appearances.
And the thing I'm thinking about a lot today is what if none of those memories ever happened? What if there were no Ozzy Osbourne? How different would my life be? How much emptier? And then I get to thinking about how unlikely any of this truly was: four blokes from Birmingham eschew a guaranteed lifetime of factory drudgery, and then become...rock stars? Really! It happened! That said, it happened because it had to happen, because all of them made it happen. "Very often, I'm asked what I think I'd be doing if [it] wasn't rock and roll," Ozzy told Penelope Spheeris in The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. (Look, the orange juice pour is real if you want it to be.) Ozzy's answer: "...probably in prison." He didn't want a regular job. He didn't want to conform. He didn't want a boss. Music was it or it was to the clink. Imagine constructing that kind of three-true-outcomes reality: there's either figurative prison, literal prison, or you could do the impossible and thread the needle and find freedom. (Truly, I cannot. I have to wake up in three hours to go to my stupid job.) Ozzy threaded the needle. Music was an avenue to act like a maniac and, not only get paid for it, but to find creative fulfillment. There was no other option. And there's inspiration in that. Go do your thing. Make memories. You only get one shot at this life thing, and if it ended for Ozzy, a guy who, let me check my notes here, snorted ants and, for a time, seemed more bulletproof than Keith Richards, it will end for you.
Along with the music, that will be what Ozzy leaves me, this sense that the impossible might just be possible, that nothing is preordained, that we have more control over our destiny than it sometimes feels like we do. I mean, it will take a bit for that inheritance to come to fore. I'm now currently getting absolutely annihilated by the lyrics to "My Little Man," as I'm sure many other songs will wallop me in the coming weeks. Those are the moments that feel like when you put a pet down and you just keep seeing them out of the corner of your eye, these phantoms that are waiting for the hurt in your heart to subside before they can walk back into your brain and unlock the treasure trove of happier memories. But, again, the fact I'm feeling anything for "My Little Man" at all is incredible. That's a 30-year-old deep cut that otherwise has no bearing on my life because I am a childless, crazy cat lady. What if Ozzy's final miracle was re-imbuing these songs with magic, of refreshing the well-worn? Imagine hearing "Iron Man" fresh. In a way, you kind of can. This can be your first listen post-Ozzy. Maybe, because of that, you'll pick up on new nuances, a rebirth triggered by absence. Why not? Because, really, I can think of no other person who had the power to change "Changes." And now, well, in more ways than I can even consider, thanks to that man, here I am.
Thanks for indulging me. Let's get this blog on the road. We're at the halfway point of 2025. Let's talk about it.
You can find the metal stuff here:
Onward.
ADAPAR - 3: Öpik Transmission (Iluso)
It always amazes me that all the tunes on these lists I make are released in the same year. ADAPAR, the duo of multi-instrumentalist Álvaro Domene and saxophonist Álvaro Pérez, feels so far ahead of the rest of modern music, like a peek through a tear in the space-time continuum, a demented dimension where Autechre, John Zorn, and Fredrik Thordendal are united by breakcore. Weasel Walter, no stranger to using the fringe of music as a bungee rope, called it a "disorienting duet of fractured fax-machine glitch-babble," and, really, who am I to argue with Weasel Walter? Longtime readers know I'm a Domene disciple, so you cannot quarrel with me when I call 3: Öpik Transmission that good, good stuff. Like past works, it's a lot, often all at the same time; thus, begone, normal people. You bet, this thing will shed your tin-eared, fairweather friends faster than a shaggy husky brushing past your black pants. Some folks aren't ready for the future. That said, there's something so now about what ADAPAR has achieved. Check out "The Value Of Vision." Squiggly information eternally pours out of a spigot that can't be turned off, and then, beneath the noise, big, foreboding guitar chugs rumble like thunder on the horizon. When was the last time you felt something like that? Probably today, probably while reading the news.
baan - neumann (The Ghost is Clear Records)
Huge, Hum-y guitar tone revving mid-'90s style emo past the red line. Think if Julia was intent on pissing off all its neighbors. Seoul's baan is rocking and raucous, crushing with the same screaming-amp crunch as Jeromes Dream. But, all things considered, the songs are kind of upbeat; more wistful than morose, early fall's 'reminiscing about summers' past' day-dreaming instead of deep winter's 'where are the razor blades' whispering. Possibly something you could play in the car for other people, which, for this blog, is rarer than a sober sommelier.
Barker - Stochastic Drift (Smalltown Supersound)
Barker's music is often characterized by what isn't there. I wrote a whole thing earlier this year — one of the few things of consequence with my byline on it in 2025 — about Barker killing the kick drum. Stochastic Drift, though, is different. "I noticed this unpredictability starting to creep into what I was making, and tracks were ending up a long way from the intentions they started with," Barker wrote in the liner notes. "So the challenge for this record was to try to embrace that process, to let go of expectations." And yet, there were expectations: Barker is one of the most forward-thinking people working in electronic music. How would he flip the script on Stochastic Drift? So many ways. "Positive Disintegration" harkens back to Mille Plateaux's Clicks & Cuts, this glitched-out stutter of Y2K electronics failing. "Force of Habit" emphasizes space. I wouldn't call that one minimal; it possesses an enjoyably booming bass part that could probably shake a Terry Riley album off the shelf. But it is like sitting atop a hill and looking down at an unfamiliar city stretching across a valley, these tiny, spread-out specks of light that are all part of one big thing. And then there are the dub techno-y beats of "Cosmic Microwave" that underpin burbling melodies that sound like a jazz trio recording tossed into a blender. It's a bit like the abstract cube on Stochastic Drift's cover, a multidimensional shape with unexpected axes. (Obligatory "not a math person" disclosure. Geometry went bye-bye as soon as I accepted my fate as a failed liberal arts major and discovered drugs.) That's the album on the whole, really. These songs feel like they're endlessly evolving, the only definites being that they start and stop. No expectations, and yet, expectations have been exceeded.
billy woods - GOLLIWOG (Backwoodz Studioz)
Just about peerless: the flow, the control, the technique. I'm also fascinated by how billy woods's sobering pessimism draws his collaborators closer to his worldview. Like, this is the starkest and darkest I've heard Conductor Williams, The Alchemist, and EL-P beats sound in a bit. But really, it's the words. Some of these lines will stick to you like a burr.
Sometimes it's all you can do not to do it like Sylvia Plath
My house full of gas, my kids cry, then laugh right after; psychopaths
I'm the glowing sky, burning air, cinders in the wind
"It should've been you," whispered by dead friends
Twelve billion USD hovering over the Gaza Strip
You don't wanna know what it cost to live
What it cost to hide behind eyelids
Woods has been on one of the most ridiculous runs in the genre since 2012's History Will Absolve Me ("Duck Hunt!"). GOLLIWOG is one of his finest. The only thing there is to say, really, is to listen to billy woods say it.
bvdub - 13 (Past Inside the Present)
Like Tangerine Dream caught in a Tim Hecker mist. By now, you know the score for the extra prolific Brock Van Wey: glistening, melancholic ambient that's often accompanied by ethereal, wordless vocals and deep house beats. These albums tend to be sonically dense. My compadre, David Fonseca, whose Substack you should read, described Van Wey's Earth House Hold side project as containing about as much data as one can cram onto a CD. Indeed, Van Wey's thing is applying the same many-layered principles of, say, shoegaze to down-tempo IDM. Bvdub, which is his primary vector for expression, is at its best when it sounds like an outpouring of emotion, that feeling when euphoria is tinged with the background radiation of sadness, of knowing that moment, while gratifying, is fleeting. (To that end, the album art for A Thousand Words, which is objectively sweet, makes me burst into tears every time I see it. I probably need to discuss that with my therapist.) Anyway, 13 is Van Wey's most impactful album in a while because it works counter to his established conventions without losing the artist's voice. Per Past Inside the Present, the venerable ambient label for which Van Wey is making his debut, "every section represents one edict or idea from chapter 13 of the Tao Te Ching," pulling out this particular passage in the liner notes:
Accept being unimportant.
Do not be concerned with loss and gain.
Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things.
Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.
Thus, 13 surrenders many bvdub hallmarks: there are no vocals, and this is the least smeary, in the sonic sense, that Van Wey has been in a while. It's pretty direct, even, with each layer operating with a purpose instead of getting lost within the Deepchord-esque echo chamber. Also, I don't know, man, the melodies just whip.
Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek - Yarın Yoksa (Big Crown Records)
I'm going to quote liberally from the last blurb I wrote for Yarın Yoksa to alleviate my suffering from having to write about it for a third time. Here's the meat:
As the story goes, as relayed to The Guardian in a pretty great profile, Derya Yıldırım and her future bandmates were tasked with making art for an upcoming festival, but no one spoke the same language. No matter. Music bridged the gap. "When we started to concentrate on our instruments, we found a common language." Yıldırım said. "It was like a perfect match on a date."
Over 10 years later, that match is still perfect. Yarın Yoksa is the quartet's third album, one that builds upon past successes. While nominally part of a growing throwback Turkish psych scene, Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek is a little bit more than just a re-interpreter. "I know people think we play retro music, but for me what we do is more like soul meets folk," Yıldırım told The Guardian. "I am not from Turkey and don't want to do the same thing they did in the '60s and '70s. I am from Germany."
Thus, you get something like "Cool Hand," which is like Can crossed with Erkin Koray, except it's its own thing, too. That mostly comes down to the lyrics and themes. Per the Bandcamp PR copy, "The message is poetic and complicated, repeatedly declaring 'I love you, I'm crazy about you' but ultimately finding a sense of peace through accepting a broken heart." This fits in with the general overarching album concept, one grappling with various ways the world makes the heart heavy. "Direne Direne" is, as that PR copy makes clear, a protest song. Others deal with sadness. And yet, there's an earwormy buoyancy that keeps Yarın Yoksa from sounding maudlin. It also doesn't hurt that this is one of the best-sounding records I've heard this year.
What I failed to mention is that Yıldırım can absolutely shred a bağlama, and Antonin Voyant's basslines have that feted-by-me quality of making room to roam, taking an active role in teasing out and bolstering harmonies. Yarın Yoksa is just a good hang, well-suited for a Sunday morning.
The Egyptian Lover - 1987 (Egyptian Empire Records)
Over 40 years into his career, we finally have a good descriptor for Egyptian Lover: "L.A.T.R.O." That would be "Los Angeles electro" for those who have trouble parsing vanity license plates. Anyway, the big man is back with the fourth installment of the 198x series that kicked off in 2015 with 1984. That one had a killer titled "P.E.L.F.," which was as good, if not better, than anything from the classic era. And that tracks because Egyptian Lover has never abandoned his roots. At the end of the day, this is a smooth dude doing neat shit on an 808. 1987 kicks in a few soon-to-be live show staples, such as the g-funkin' "In the Limo," kraut-y by way of Bambaataa "Goin n' Goin," and the incandescently horny "Dirty Passionate Yell," which I saw getting a workout at 808 Fest. Can confirm: it booms, it bangs. (I caught Egyptian Lover three times last year, which means I probably have a graduate degree in the ancient and arcane study of needing a freak.) Anyway, this is a total party starter on a platter. 1987 sure beats 2025.
Final - giving up, one day at a time (Avalanche Recordings)
I'll write it again: You and me both, bud. For those not in the know, Final is the noise/ambient project of JK Broadrick. Here's Broadrick in a 2013 self-titled interview:
Initially an excuse to rip off Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse, until I discovered Brian Eno and Maurizio Bianchi, that is. ... Final is my project to explore beat-less spaces.
Beat-less? How about, uh, hopeless. (They're not all gems, folks.) Giving up, one day at a time is "an ode to depression, loneliness and decay." Of course, these six long tracks don't sound like real depression, which is mostly crushingly boring. (Ask me how I know!) But it nails a specific sort of ennui, an emptiness, an erosion of the soul caused by the lack of connection, the cruel passage of time, and knowing you'll get neither back. At its best, giving up, one day at a time sounds like how emotional numbness feels, of aimlessly moving throughout the world completely disconnected from your surroundings, encased within your own dejection. That said, and this is the important part, these compositions have momentum, nailing the sensation, or lack thereof in this case, of inertness without being inert themselves. All told, reminiscent of Kevin Drumm's "Just Lay Down and Forget It," in execution and evoked emotions, really. And, like Drumm's aforementioned masterpiece, how you experience it, and even how you listen to it, changes with your mood and surroundings, teasing out new elements that can make it feel like a fresh listen. Cool stuff.
Gelli Haha - Switcheroo (Innovative Leisure)
Stick with me on this one. For a whole summer, I was obsessed with Ultraísta and Capsule. I'd play Ultraísta during my morning train ride, and then Stereo Worxxx at night. It was a good year. I was drawn to them for different reasons. Ultraísta had this analog warmth to it, wrapping itself like a wool sweater around supremely catchy tunes. Capsule, at that point in its history, was pure dance id, that Friday night desire to be rolling deep in an 'until it ends' rave. Gelli Haha's Switcheroo splits the difference. Real synths light up these songs like a rainbow, a kaleidoscope of tones generated by the same gear that, in other hands, would probably end up making a YMO tribute. And Haha's MO is to make you dance, oscillating between a strut and a disco thump. Opener "Funny Music" pulsates with a bass throb that anchors coruscating arpeggios — the little descending, percussive synth before the chorus, which walks downward like a Slinky on stairs, is brilliant. "Tiramisu," on the other hand, is more on the Capsule continuum, bopping into that zone when everything feels magical because you're blindingly blitzed — Haha's pleas during the chorus feel desperate, a friend yelling at her friends to join her, as if transcendence is one more dance away, so get on the floor, goddamnit. The difference between Ultraísta and Capsule and Gelli Haha is that Gelli Haha is weird. She's weird! (There's a reason the P4K writeup spent a couple grafs setting the stage to proclaim Haha a real freak.) Now, it's not just that neither Nigel Godrich nor Yasutaka Nakata would title a song "Piss Artist." No, it's all of the avant-weirdness that creeps in along Switcheroo's edges: the strange squiggles and shifted sounds that end up being earworm Easter eggs, such as the martial industrial march that pops up on the otherwise twirling and tranquil "Dynamite." What even is that? While the two share little in common, I'd almost place Gelli Haha closer to Weird LA crews like Dolphin Hyperspace than anything else happening in pop in the moment. Anyway, Switcheroo is my favorite album of the year. BONK!
Mainliner - A Soul That Eats Flesh and Melts : Live in Kobe 2025 (self-released)
There are records that people use to test out speakers. And then there are records that people use to wreck the speakers of their enemies irrevocably. This Mainliner live date recorded in January of this year is the latter. Look, I know, it's pretty much noise. But my, my, my, what a delightful racket. After a fake out of a serene opening, "Blasphemy Hunter" sounds like three Les Rallizes Dénudés bootlegs being routed through a distortion pedal. The only musical elements you can make out from below guitarist Kawabata Makoto's blanket of fuzz are Taigen Kawabe's spectral singing and the occasional crash of Shimura Koji's drum kit. Be that as it may, hot damn, does that wall of noise gr-o-o-o-ve, battering you into a trance with two repetitive bends. By the "solo" section in the song's middle, you've either found peace through pain like Pinhead at a Cenobite acupuncturist, or you have no idea what I'm talking about because you never made it that far. Either way, rules. Wish I were there.
Morgue File - Deathbed Phenomena (Deathbed Tapes)
As you can tell by the more morbid slant of some of these blebs, I have been preoccupied with death lately. Can't really tell you why. Maybe the ticks and tocks of the clock are finally catching up to me. Perhaps it's just the occupational hazard of listening to brutal death metal every day. Whatever the case, I've been focused on the end, particularly what it'll feel like when I check out, and whether there's a fitting music analog. There's precedence. People who have had out-of-body near-death experiences have said that Iasos's "The Angels of Comfort" nailed the incident. I will now cede the floor to Iasos, who died last year, and might now actually know if that's right or not. This is from a 2014 Vice interview:
Professor Joel Funk at Plymouth State University was doing experiments on people who had near-death experiences [in 1989]. One thing was they all went through a tube of light, the other thing was they all were met by a loving angelic being, and they all heard heavenly music. He was curious about the heavenly music that they heard, so he played them music—jazz, pop, classical, all sorts—and asked them to rate what they heard. Strangely, one piece of mine, "The Angels of Comfort," got the highest rating by a large margin. A lot of mothers tell me they played that music while they are having their baby, and other people say they played it to friends and relatives as they were dying. The interesting thing is that at a certain point in my career I realized I could play anything I could imagine, so I thought 'I want to make music that has the energy of the holy spirit in it.'
I mean, I guess. But that sounds far too serene for the ways I'm liable to go. No offense to Iasos, but "The Angels of Comfort" sounds like something a fly-by-night "shaman" named Susan would play for you while you chugged ayahuasca in a suburban retreat. (It's cool, nonetheless.) So, instead, may I forward a different answer? How about Morgue File's Deathbed Phenomena? Hello, it's right there in the name. And the dark ambient slash death industrial, with its alien burbles, Xenakis-style atom-smashing collisions, and metal-on-metal clangs, feels fittingly frightful and funereal. It's not what would play after the Silent Hill siren would go off, but it could score the aftermath once the klaxons cease screaming, when Pyramid Head is walking away with your skin over his shoulder with the carefree ease of Frank Sinatra, and you're leaking the rest of your life force into cracks in the pavement. Definitely good haunted house fodder, at the very least.
Motorbike - Kick It Over (Feel It Records)
I woke myself up from an otherwise pleasant nap by thinking that I was going to die and have nothing really to show for it. Sure, I've spent the last decade making significant advances in the coverage of music that sounds like a toilet, but personal growth? I mean...no, not really. And that got me thinking about just how hard it is to change. Like, Cincinnati's Motorbike could've kept making hypnotically rocking music that pumped with the adrenaline of the band's inciting incident: "Jerri fell off his moped so we started a band." Not that that stuff is absent from Kick It Over: Hell, "Afraid of Guns" is like something the Nervous Eaters would have pumped out between illicit rendezvous, and "Western Front" has that Heartbreakers sneering strut to it if it were channeled through the lizard brain drone of "Street Fighting Man" — plus, you know, saxophones. Nothing is really that different from Motorbike, the band's 2023 debut. And yet, hold up, saxophones? Kick It Over is surprisingly varied and almost experimental, even, especially for the kind of record that it is. Like, "Currency" ends with the type of freak out that would manifest if a psych band left oscillators on in the shared practice space. The B-side is no less adventurous. "Quite Nice" whips, adding the country twang of a deserted Route 66 road to a loud garage ripper that's on the precipice of psych rock — it's a lesson in how a band can rock hard without being hard rock. "Nie Wrócimy" sounds like a crew of punkers three heroic espresso chugs deep into an off-the-cuff Mud cover…in Polish, and then half the band decides to do Public Image Ltd. strident squalls. Like a Bandcamp comment said, no two songs sound the same. Ultimately, this is what I hoped The Men would transition into after Open Your Heart. Instead, they found Meat Puppets II in a used bin and fell off faster than me riding a motorcycle through the testing ground of an exceedingly sadistic speed bump factory. Things look way more interesting for Motorbike. Keep changing, dudes.
Rachel Brooke - Sings Sad Songs (self-released)
Let's start with the finale first: the click of a tape recorder getting turned off. Rachel Brooke is all alone on this outing: just the singer, her guitar, and a set of songs that glimmer like slivers of a shattered glass heart. Not every song is about personal heartache: "Dying on Vacation" trains its sights on "suicidal baby boomers," "All Apologies" is indeed the Nirvana song, and "You More" finds love in a hopeless place, i.e., the current world we're living in. But the majority of these outlaw-adjacent country weepers are of the primo, 'cry in your beer' variety. "I found your Willie record on the shelf," Brooke sings, her 'felt it all' voice filling in the margins with undeniable ache. "I put it on up 'til dawn, just dancing by myself/ I still have all of those little things — letters, keys, and golden rings/ I still believe in what they used to mean." Nothing like that lingering feeling of somebody who used to be there, the torture of having to keep living after the end. Of course, you could sum up Sings Sad Songs with how it starts: "Lonely Old Bummer." Yeahhhhhh.
Self Improvement - Syndrome (Feel It Records)
The cover song on Self Improvement's last album, Visible Damage, summed up the Long Beach-based punks pretty well: a mash-up of Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" and "Firestarter" played like Suburban Lawns or Suburban Wives went on a This Heat dub bender. Syndrome expands upon that sound without sacrificing the sparseness. This is a band that writes music and then erases most of it. And, my, is it spacious: you could parade a herd of pachyderms through the expanse between the instruments. (Granted, like a true snob, I'm listening to this on vinyl. Ymmv.) Still, the nerviness fills in the negative space. Recently caught them live — the real deal.
Water Damage - Instruments (12XU)
The Austin decet goes to 11 on Instruments, inviting guitarist David Grubbs and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi into the fray. LA experimental mainstay Shiroishi, who was last in these pages for Corima, stars on "Reel 28," a slow creeper, steady like an antique steam engine chugging uphill, that uses a baritone sax to add weight to the groove. This is pure Water Damage, a sidelong foray into improvisation that, as Adam Neely would say, is legitimized by repetition. It reminds me a bit of old Pharaoh Overlord before that band had Antti Boman in the Rolodex. Where the two separate is Water Damage is noisy, increasing the thrum until the frequencies ring like tinnitus. Grubbs guests on "Reel 25" and "Reel 32," two more longform workouts primed for zoning out, dropping out, and weeding out. "25," in particular, is very zone-y, following a Roy Montgomery-like drone with a spurs-rattling stomp that is equipped with a little accent grave cry that sounds like a quizzical cat meow. But there's a lot there for those who have the patience to zone in. Keying in on how these layers are constructed is half the battle, like stepping closer to an impressionistic painting and admiring the brushstrokes. Just, you know, with more drummers than a BOGO snare sale at Guitar Center.
Stuff I Haven't Jammed Enough Yet...And EPs
A surface listen suggests this is extremely my stuff. Cello by Annie Blythe, electronics by Scarcity's Brendon Randall-Myers.
Found this at press time, and I'm banging it into the CMS like I deserve a starring role in the Superman movie. Uh…angry! Philly! Makes sense.
Been on the wishlist for eons. "Black Harsh Death" is right. This is noise of the horror variety, a harrowing abuse of the 2600 synthesizer.
Not really "new," but it's nice having the live band sesh versions of "Overtime" and "Time Traveler" on the MP3 player without having to resort to configuring a YouTube downloader. Both tracks rip, and are the pinnacle of LA's weird jazz scene, funking harder than music school kids have any right to.
I lost track of Lord Snow after Sovngarde, one of those early EPs of this current wave of screamo that proved that the genre still had it. (Again, the Petethepiratesquid era of screamo was...bleak — no offense to them. I am OK if Ultra Dolphins doesn't reform for nostalgia fests — no offense to them, either.) Anyway, OG singer An Lacy is back, and this rerecording of post-Lacy songs sounds great with their voice. Kind of mad I'm missing Lord Snow live in August because every promoter decided to book cool shows on the same day.
Wild, like an avant-garde version of Pentangle or something. There's a lot of music nerd grist for the music nerd mill here: "When I was writing Otherworld, I was thinking of questions like what if the guitar could sing?"; "I wanted to challenge the conventions of classical guitar and voice, principally by breaking free from the constraints of equal temperament (12 equally spaced notes); "The music shifts between moments of unity and individuality—guitar and voice as one body, then as distinct entities." Sick. However, I don't think you need to nerd out to crack this stuff. Hearing Ashman's voice dancing over these arpeggios is more than enough to make you feel something.
Honestly, didn't know this was out. Live 40! and Radio Live Stream were some of my favorite albums from their respective years. Bassist Dan Berglund joins Mats Öberg and Morgan Ågren for a set that stretches out a lot of standbys. As invigoratingly alien as ever.
Been on a big Motorpsycho kick as of late, but the binge hasn't made it to the new one. (I also don't own The All Is One, so if some nice Euro wants to, you know, help me out there...) Gotta be good if a band is going self-titled 36 years into its career, right? Kind of fascinated by the schism between the RYM and Progarchives communities. The former prefers the early stuff when the Norwegians were more of a slacker indie rock band. The latter, naturally, digs the prog stuff. I side more prog, but all eras are worth your time.
If you're making chill-out music in 2025, you're doing the lord's work. This reprise of a meet-up between two paragons of psych, minimalist, and new age brain-matter-expanders is a vibe, yes, but don't ignore the neat musicianship, such as "Clock no Clock"'s sustained burst of drums as flutes bounce around on top. Wish I could relax more, thus wish I could listen to it more.
There's too much music, man. Haven't spent a second with this Lankum side project. My light reading on the subject sounds like another new spin on folk. Stoked.
Likewise, haven't been in the right head space for avant-garde classical, so felt like a false writing expansively about Vampire Boudoir and Babalon. Still, this stuff is legit, no BDMer living out a funny fantasy. Vampire Boudoir is also legit unnerving — super spooky.
Nemesta: no fluke. TDK is even more caustic on ZHVK, delivering some of the best noise rock of the year. But what makes this short set shine is all the prog — like Fripp's entire NYC period condensed into three intrepid songs.
A classic case of needing to see a band live to determine if I want to buy its record. Yes, that's backward, but that's the luxury a live music hub like LA affords me. I like what I've heard of The Tubs's high-energy jangle, but I need the corporeal to push me one way or the other.
On The Horizon
Big fan of Canty's Quiet Flame, which calmly smoldered like an ember that couldn't be snuffed out. That one was supposed to be a solo effort, but became a band affair thanks to chance occurrences. Glad the band stuck.
The long-awaited Ciel LP. Not far removed from the modern dreampop/nu-gaze milieu. Well executed, though, and much gothier, which is a welcome twist.
Not totally sold on the single — a little too '2000s VH1 video block' for me — but extra life's "waterlilly" is one of the best pop songs of the decade, so I'm sure Crushed will bring the goods. Plus, as if it needs to be said again, Temple of Angels' Bre Morell can sing. Last year, I also saw the duo live on a night when it rained so hard that someone at the show asked if I wanted to go viral by surfing the normally bone-dry LA River, which kind of makes sense thematically.
Hell yeah, a song titled "Spud Leveler." Worth it for that alone, but Flender's melding of no-wave and space rock makes an even stronger case. Decoherence, one of the finest labels dealing in this kind of degeneracy, nails the FFOs: "...you'll probably love if you're a fan of the Butthole Surfers, Trumans Water, Acid Mothers, and the Dead C." Downside: Press it on CD, damnit!
Dude. It's Guck. Read this.
I will throw money at anything that invokes the name "Metro Area." It appears here: "But in its own way it remains a reflection of Harvey Sutherland's musical landscapes, which stretch across the grit and glitter of private-press disco and the sensual grids of Metro Area." Rad. Adored Boy, a nu-school funker that had a spellbinding sense of how to stack hooks. So far, Debt sounds more like Disclosure, which isn't a bad thing at all. Interested. Again, had me at Metro Area.
A Briefing on the Human Condition blew my hair back in 2021, proving that the nu-screamo renaissance was in full swing. Life In Parallel sounds a little more polished, not unlike the band guest singer Geoff Rickley used to front: Thursday. To prove this might be the most New Jersey album in a while, Folly's Jon Tumillo also guests. Folly!
Ridiculous lineup: joining bassist Oh are trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. I usually have a tough time hanging with jazz that doesn't feature a traditional chordal instrument, but that kind of pedigree is tough to pass up. (A bass can technically play chords, I guess. I don't know. Yell at me in the comments.)
I've been out on Pharaoh Overlord since, jeez, #4 — like, start a new band if you want to dick around with NWOFHM. But if we're back to slow-movin' grooves sans vocals, I am intrigued.
I fell hard for It Unfolds in 2019, a gentle album that was the consoling embrace I needed right at that moment. (Rozi Plain's What a Boost came in for the group hug.) Opener "WBHB" is in that vein, like taking a deep breath and obviating a blow-up. Interesting genesis, too: "Spirit Phase is a collection of six tracks salvaged from a corrupted hard drive. Incomplete, but honest. Instead of trying to recreate what was lost, I chose to let the songs live as they are: raw, minimal, and true to the moment they were captured."
Go to shows. Buy music. Support artists.
Do you want a better version of this?
Support Machine Music.
Support Rennie.
Support Lamniformes Cuneiform.
Check out Wolf's other garbage: https://linktr.ee/wrambatz
Great article, Ian! Saving a lot of these on my Bandcamp wishlist right now. Thanks so much for including ADAPAR. Love your review of Öpik Transmission! Hope you are well.