Reviews – Page 9 – The Resident Sound

REVIEW: Cal Folger Day – At The Roots of The Stars (Solo Edition) (2017)

I once met Cal Folger Day at a show in NC. She was on tour with The Bonk from Ireland, herself an American living abroad for at least a couple of years as I remember. Another rainy weekday, which meant maybe 5 people showed up. I had just witnessed one of the best shows I had ever seen up to that point, and with the little cash I had that night I bought as much Cal Folger Day merch as I could.

Enter At The Roots of The Stars (Solo Edition); a download card made of thick bevel-cut mat board and printed on with rich pink and black inks. None of this is important to the musical qualities of the album itself, obviously. Consider it an appreciation for the artists who put a level of care into their download cards and, as of now, the only download card I have kept after use.

Cal Folger Day’s use of text-to-speech accompanying ‘vocals’ bring a level of subversiveness to At The Roots of The Stars. The integration of text-to-speech in music has been marred by meme-culture association and general reluctance in classically trained circles to integrate with new sounds or experiment. But Cal Folger Day commands a level of mastery over it. The text-to-speech ‘vocals’ add a dimension of emotional coldness and disdain which is repeatedly overcome by the warmth and humanity of Day’s dynamic singing.

“The text is a short play written in 1919 called ‘At The Roots of The Stars’ by Djuna Barnes. I have such an utterly unshakable confidence in the beauty of the language that the work every day of finding the most nimble, pleasant, natural melody for the words was terribly easy. As if I needed additional motivation, this feeling that I have, of being simply abashed that Djuna Barnes is today a relatively unknown name, lent a strong sense of justification and indeed obligation, less to her ghost than to myself and other readers/listeners,” wrote Cal Folger Day for An Áit Eile, a culture, society and ecology site based in Ireland.

At The Roots of The Stars (Solo Edition) is currently unavailable online. If ever given the chance to stream or get a copy of this album, take it. Until then you can check out Cal Folger Day’s site here or their Bandcamp where other beautiful works of theirs are available.

For fans of: Karen Dalton, Vashti Bunyan, Sibylle Baier

Like Cal Folger Day? Give these a listen: Myles Manley, András Cséfalvay, Concette Abbate

REVIEW: Myles Manley – AAA (2020)

Myles Manley’s 2020 EP release AAA is what Of Montreal and other indie bands of the late-naughts would have tried to be if they had carried higher artistic aspirations. A lush yet intimate recording, AAA is an intricate tapestry of emotion.

Myles Manley’s work is a great example of metamodernist ‘new sincerity’ within music. Humor briefly flourishes before being struck back down by underlying pain, all made very real by a high-degree of sonic intimacy. AAA is by no means a record that will be playing over the grandstands of your sporting locale. No, this one is best heard in your room, at night, speaker in reach. Opening track I Took On America And Won has been through my headphones a couple dozen times while wandering the local graveyards, and if you’re given the chance to do so I would highly recommend it.

Sometimes it can be difficult to understand if the lyrics should be interpreted in an abstract, surreal manner, or painfully direct and honest. While maybe not intended, this does allow for AAA to burn slowly with layered re-listening and reinterpretation. What is certain is that AAA is a triumph of the extended-play format, and ought to make it into your listening rotation should you find yourself alone anytime in the near future.

For fans of: Why?, The Angst, Sibylle Baier

Like Myles Manley? Give these a listen: Cal Folger Day, Concetta Abbate, András Cséfalvay

REVIEW: Concetta Abbate – Behind The Red Door (2016)

Opening with 30 seconds of unintelligible rumbling, it would be easy to believe you were listening to the sounds of the ocean; a strange experience for a live album.

Recorded live at Spectrum on April 30th of 2016, Behind The Red Door casts the listener forever in a sea of strange melancholia. The sounds of papers shuffling, room tone, and occasional rustling may, on paper, seem like the unfortunate consequences of recording live, but in the case of Behind The Red Door, every sound is perfectly in place. Violins, viola and cello are focal nearly throughout, though are briefly departed midway through for tracks Counting 1 & 2 before being reunited with the listener soon after. Concetta Abbate’s ability to to transition complete instrument substitutions with ease serves the album well, and keeps the listener in a state of wonderment.

The ebb and flow of the sweet and the eerie guide the listener with comforting force through the occasional vignette of near-gleeful tracks such as Dust, which retires itself to the melancholy from which it came.

Give yourself the gift of intimate listening, and take time to sit down to Concetta Abbate’s Behind The Red Door.

For fans of: Why?, Richard Hawley, Joanna Newsom

Like Concetta Abbate? Give these a listen: Cal Folger Day, Myles Manley, András Cséfalvay

REVIEW: András Cséfalvay – Funeral The Musical And Another Tabletop Opera (2013)

A creepy voice pronounces the word “prologue” in a way I’ve never quite heard it pronounced before. Maybe it’s British, maybe they’re born with it. No time for such sociolinguistical mysteries! Suddenly we’re off under waves of heavy but simple organ. Suddenly there it is again. A voice not entirely unlike Noel Fielding as the goth Richmond Avenal on sitcom The IT Crowd.

At times goofy, there is a level of showmanship that shouldn’t go unappreciated. A few motifs make up the entire work, differentiated by various keyboard settings. But even with the goofy lyrical speech of tracks such as Wormsong and National Ændthem (the latter of which being an intensely melodramatic reworking of The Star-Spangled Banner), Funeral The Musical is a genuinely spooky and haunting adventure in grief and death.

Funeral The Musical may not be such foreign territory for those in puppetry and carnival/freak show revivalist circles, but to those who haven’t lived in one of the hundreds of cities with a ‘Keep ____ Weird’ sticker, well, it may actually be pretty ground breaking stuff.

For fans of: Nurse With Wound, Cornbugs, the videos of David Firth

Like András Cséfalvay? Give these a listen: Myles Manley, Cal Folger Day, Concetta Abbate

REVIEW: Black Magnum – Sick of Living/Unwilling to Die (1995)

Sick of Living/Unwilling to Die is a not so subtle ode to the Zodiac Killer, a serial killer whose larger than life self-PR department helped fuel terror and intrigue throughout the 1960s/70s. A one-trick pony of face-value misogyny, Black Magnum’s inability to offer any type of substantial narrative, played ad nauseam, crosses into territory of uncreative fixation. Given its emotional weight, one would hope violence as artistic subject matter would be utilized better than a ‘dead baby nailed to 10 trees’-type joke.

It isn’t that violence can’t be used in this manner and work well. Bands like Ted Bundy’s Volkswagon and Theatre of Ice have used depictions and speculation of real life violence as a backdrop for topics such as the human condition, isolation, life and loss.

So what does Black Magnum have to offer us? Unfortunately not much. While opening track Oh Well offers heavy grunge riffs, sloppy fun drumming, and intriguing sample usage, Sick of Living/Unwilling to Die fails to deliver anything other than mundane songwriting and moronic lyrics.

Like Black Magnum? Maybe try one of these instead: Ted Bundy’s Volkswagon, Lubricated Goat, God Bullies

REVIEW: Art Brut – Art Brut vs. Satan (2009)

As an American, liking Art Brut in 2009 was about as simultaneously nerdy and hipster as being into British shows like Spaced or Louis Theroux documentaries. Remind you, this is pre-Sherlock phenom. Actors like Matt Berry weren’t being given full weekly articles just because we can.

Looking back twelve years, Art Brut vs. Satan holds up incredibly well. Unfortunately for Art Brut being timeless in an age of nostalgia and hyper-pastiche doesn’t work to their advantage. The songwriting is straight forward and stripped down. Vocal metres are occasionally emphasized by syncopated stabs, unifying the band’s effort throughout the album. The band’s unification lends itself perfectly to building emotional potency, especially over the course of Art Brut’s long build ups. The Replacements (a song about The Replacements) ends with a stacking of Gregorian-esque backing vocals under singer Eddie Argos hysterics over choosing between cheaper secondhand CDs or reissue CDs (extra tracks, mind you).

Vs. Satan is closed off with the lengthy Mysterious Bruises, a relatively funky and lonely song about a lost night out. Its on-and-off soft choruses and punchier verses is reminiscent of The Pixies, which is appropriate as the album was produced by Pixies frontman Black Francis.

“Our songs are true stories and I wanted to do them once or twice and record them because you’ll lose that sincerity if you do that again and again and again. After we realized we wanted to do that we asked ‘who is the expert at doing that?’ and came up with Frank Black because that’s how he did all of the (Frank Black and the) Catholics’ albums. And also, he’s cool and we wanted to hang out with him. ‘What excuse could we use to hire Frank Black?’ And then he said that he liked us, so we signed him up.” – Eddie Argos in an interview with Three Imaginary Girls blog. You can read an archived version of the interview here.

Argo’s spoken delivery is often compared to the late Mark E Smith, but is distinguished by a greater sense of emotional urgency. On vs. Satan, Argos delivers lines of daily mediocrity, yet sells the listener on existential joys and cultural ponderings. Nothing embodies the antithesis of rock behemoths Led Zeppelin and Kiss more than Art Brut, and what’s more punk than that?

In many ways, the music culture gripes expressed throughout Art Brut vs. Satan got me thinking about music in the way I do now. This album was released right before I entered highschool. I was at my peak interest in Primus, Gwar, and dime-a-dozen rockabilly bands. So on midway track Demons Out! when Argos begs “how can you sleep at night when nobody likes the music we like?” Well, it felt like he was speaking directly to my angry middle-schooler self.

They’re not on Bandcamp yet, but maybe one day they will be. Till then, you can buy the album on iTunes or search for it on Spotify.

Read Eddie Argos’s blog or visit Art Brut’s website.

For fans of: Kaiser Chiefs, Psychedelic Furs, Richard Hell & The Voidoids

Like Art Brut? Give these a listen: Hazy Sour Cherry, Shorty Can’t Eat Books, Geisha Girls

REVIEW: Tropic Of Cancer – Stop Suffering (2015)

Somewhere between Portishead’s Dummy and Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See belongs Stop Suffering, the 2015 minimal darkwave EP by Camella Lobo’s solo project Tropic of Cancer. Opening track and album namesake Stop Suffering moves with such elegance as to make a ‘liquid’ analogy tedious. Given the gift of synthetic sounds, this album is able to rival the airy attributes of Art Blakey’s Drum Thunder Suite. Tropic of Cancer managers to smother any desire the listener may have for things to be faster. Like fractal patterns in nature, everything is set just-so.

I Woke Up And The Storm Was Over begins to take things slower. The album itself is sparse for percussion. Light drum machine kicks cloaked in reverb, machine cowbell and toms lightly blip in and out. Lobo manipulates the airspace with a distanced Morricone-styled guitar, acting more as a slipstream in the cold, windy climate cast upon the listener.

Peers of Tropic of Cancer tend to fall short by checking out of the artistic process mid-way through, almost as if they decided there was nothing more they could do with the long swaths of time between notes. Crafting and tailoring each note’s placement and timbre, Lobo is able to flood the space with intense emotion. Fortified, the album carries the listener from take off to landing without ever dropping us.

While many musicians treat it as the confines of genre, choosing tempo is an important step in sculpting the work you wish to create. Much like types of wood or stone, what attributes does it bring? What caveats come with it? What is enhanced and what is more likely to be overlooked? Some don’t consider the importance of their decisions, instead leaving it to the guiding hand of the universe. When tempo, timbre, and the like are treated as inconsequential genre conventions, a musician rolls the dice with every release they put out.

Stop Suffering is a cultural payoff of the mental and artistic labor that we all benefit from.

For fans of: Mazzy Star, Slowdive, Portishead

Like Tropic of Cancer? Give these a listen: Cold Choir, Sleep Research Facility, Bohren & der Club of Gore

REVIEW: ENTS – Demo (2012)

Screeching tension starts before you even know it. High-ended guitar comes across loud and, well, loud while drums and bass stab and punctuate underneath. Suddenly all stops as a lone note drones from the guitar. Then it happens, and before you know it opening track Chester Lampwick is over.

Over the course of the next 6 minutes, ENTS rarely repeats a chorus. They’re self defined as “flower violence,” a mix of emo and power violence, with traces of hardcore and screamo acts like Orchid, but like their power violence roots suggest, are incredibly raw and unpolished. Their entire discography, last added to with Live at The A-FRAME – 2/17/12, doesn’t fill 30 minutes, and it doesn’t need to. Much like their songs, nothing is ever around for long. Appreciate it while it’s there, and go grab the free download of Demo from their Bandcamp page.

For fans of: Orchid, Pageninetynine, Human Remains

Like ENTS? give these a listen: Busted Chops, Cheap Art, Nermal

REVIEW: False Figure – A Promised End (2019)

While listening to False Figure, ‘a promised end’ to this mundane EP was quite reassuring.

I’m fairly certain I’ve heard this record before. Actually many times before. There is nothing distinguishing this album from the many others that are nearly identical to it, many also released under the flags of two-word alliterated band names. All parts of this album are interchangeable with the parts of other songs on the album.

False Figure’s look and sound scream a Gene Belcher “this is ME now” level of vapid personality. Actually, the band name does seem quite fitting now that I think of it. Death rock is the new gentrified neighborhood. Disneyfied ad nauseam, bands bring to their work the ingenuity and artistic truth of an NBC sitcom. Detached from its subcultural roots while continuing to profit off of it, the faux-goth wave of recent years wears the sardonic mask necessary to keep selling children black leather tchotchkes.

The prophecy foretold, pop hath eaten itself.

For fans of: Secret Shame

Like False Figure? maybe try one of these instead: Geisha Girls, Rule of Thirds, Killed By Deathrock Vol.1

REVIEW: Mom$ – Rave Shit 2 (2018)

Stunted by inconsistent leveling, clipping and mixing, Rave Shit 2 functions more as a mixtape or sketchbook of ideas. Yet Mom$ delivers more than sonic sketches. RS2 is a showcase of simple yet fully fledged ideas from beginning to end. Its choppy nature and bass heavy presence lends itself to the hip-hop and dance tracks it samples while simultaneously giving each track a level of raw edge.

Mom$’ presentation is textbook E-kid; retro interpretation of the internet’s early years, digital trash glitching and anime cyberpunk iconography. Korg synth swells and kicks that sound like they’re coming through the wall sandwich the 90s-styled triplet stabs and filtered samples. Ultimately, Mom$’ style of techno and house is interchangeable with many other records out there in a flooded electronic music market. So while it may not be a particularly distinguished record, RS2 is great fun and I encourage anyone interested to give it a listen.

For fans of: Lord Lorenz, Filmmaker, Machine Girl

Like Mom$? Give these a listen: E•motion, Ulisess, MegaZoneEx