News – Page 87 – 7th Level Music

Blanck Mass’ new album, “In Ferneaux,” due February 26th.

Blanck Mass – the project of musician Benjamin John Power – announces his new album, In Ferneaux, out February 26th on Sacred Bones, and shares “Starstuff,” a single edit from the album. It’s the follow-up to 2019’s Animated Violence Mild, which “channels the horrors of the surveillance state and the creeping dread of everyday life into the most aggressive music of [Power’s] career” (Pitchfork). In turn, In Ferneaux explores pain in motion, building audio-spatial chambers of experience and memory.

Using an archive of field recordings from a decade of global travels, isolation gave Blanck Mass an opportunity to make connections in a moment when being together is impossible. The record is divided into two long-form journeys that gather the memories of being with now-distant others through the composition of a nostalgic travelogue. The journeys are haunted with the vestiges of voices, places, and sensations. These scenes alternate with the building up and releasing of great aural tension, intensities that emerge from the trauma of a personal grieving process which has perhaps embraced its rage moment.

An encounter with a prophetic figure on the streets of San Francisco presented the question of “how to handle the misery on the way to the blessing.” This is the quandary of the impasse we now all find ourselves in, trapped in our little caves, grappling with the unease of the self at rest – without movement, without the consumerist agenda of “new experiences.” The possibility of growth, always defined by our connections with others, held in limbo. Sartre said that “Hell is other people,” but perhaps this is the Inferno of the present: the space of sitting with the self.

A blessing is often thought of as a future reward, above and beyond the material plane. With In Ferneaux, Blanck Mass wrangles the immanent materials of the here-and-now to build a sense of transcendence. Here, the uncanny angelic hymn sits comfortably beside the dirge. The misery and blessing are one.
Stream “Starstuff” (Single Edit):
https://youtu.be/gF8U-dU2VWw

Pre-order In Ferneaux:
http://sacredbonesrecords.com/products/sbr267-blanck-mass-in-ferneaux

In Ferneaux Tracklist:
1. Phase I
2. Phase II

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Wenches release “Bad Man” from upcoming album.

Bloomington, IN quartet Wenches (ex-members of Racebannon) share the first video single from their forthcoming debut album Effin’ Gnarly today via Metal Injection. Watch and share “Bad Man” video HERE. (Direct YouTube and stream the single via Bandcamp.)

Assembled from broken bits and leftover chunks of various known and unknown groups in the punk, metal and post-hardcore world, Wenches hail from Bloomington, Indiana in the heart of the Midwest. Described by No Echo as “raw, no bullshit…undiluted rock realness” and in the vein of proto-punk bands like MC5 and The Stooges, the debut album Effin’ Gnarly is slated for a February 2021 release.
Tracked at Russian Recording (Built to Spill, Tortoise, of Montreal) and mastered by James Plotkin(Sunn O))), Pelican, Earth, ISIS), the band portrays the album as “high-energy screaming hard rock played the only way long-haired punk metalheads know how. “After a rotating door of bassists and drummers, the band has finally landed on what hopes to be a lasting lineup. Effin’ Gnarly follows a previously sold out 3-song “demo” cassette and precedes the release of a limited edition 7″ single entitled State Fair Hair.

Effin’ Gnarly will be available on LP and download on February 26, 2021 via Master Kontrol Audio. Limited edition cassettes will be released by Small Hand Factory. Pre-orders are available HERE.

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Spelljammer take us to the “Lake” on their first single in five years.

Stockholm, Sweden based trio Spelljammer share the first single from their forthcoming album Abyssal Trip today. Hear and share “Lake” via YouTube, Bandcamp and Spotify.

“The vastness of everything is something that I think about a lot,” says Spelljammer bassist/vocalist Niklas Olsson. And it certainly shows in both the expansive, sludgy sounds and contemplative lyrics of the Stockholm, Sweden based trio. Following a 5-year break between their previous album, Ancient of Days — perhaps fittingly spent pondering said vastness — Spelljammer is back with an album that perfectly bridges the band’s earlier desert rock leanings and their later massive, slow-burning riffs.

Abyssal Trip (note: carefully re-read that album title) takes its moniker from the perpetually dark, cold, oxygen-free zone at the bottom of the ocean. The 6-song, 44-minute album fittingly embodies that bleak realm with rumbling, oozing guitars intercut with dramatic melodic interludes. The songs take their time to unfurl, making them even more hypnotic. Likewise, the lyrics take a poetic approach to establishing the sonic scenery.

“The lyrical themes we address, like the ultimate doom of man, and the search and longing for new and better worlds, are still there,” Olsson says. “The concept of something undiscovered out there in vast emptiness is pretty much always present.”
The recording process for Abyssal Trip differs from previous releases in that the band — guitarist Robert Sörling, drummer Jonatan Rimsbo and Olsson — opted to capture the performances while holed up in the mental bathysphere of a house in the countryside near Stockholm. “The songs benefitted from the relaxed environment of being away from everything,” Olsson explains. Indeed, the album sounds confident and meticulously arranged, afforded by the band’s isolation. Sörling mixed the album and it was mastered by Monolord drummer Esben Willems at Berserk Audio.

Album opener “Bellwether” begins dramatically with a very slow, nearly minute-long fade in of rumbling distortion setting the stage for heavily distorted bass and guitar plucking out the lugubrious riff for another minute and a half before the drums begin, and likewise equally as long before vocals gurgle to the surface. “Lake” abruptly shifts gears, opening with an unusually fast gallop before rupturing into thundering doom that soon drops into a clean-tone Middle Eastern melodic breakdown. The title track serves as the album centerpiece, opening with ominous film dialogue about blood sacrifice that launches into pummeling, detuned guitars rumbling over gut-punching drums and howling vocals hearkening to the proto-sludge of Pink Floyd’s “The Nile Song.” The dynamic relents briefly for a slow building clean guitar melody before all instruments lock into a jerking riff topped off by a trilling Iommi style lead. Throughout, Abyssal Trip is, just like its title suggests, an epic tour through desolate zones which yields much to discover.

Abyssal Trip will be available everywhere on LP, CD and download on February 26th, 2021 via RidingEasy Records.

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Moontype take the “Ferry” on their first single.

Laying down roots at Oberlin College before officially becoming a band in Chicago last year, it has not take Moontype long to start turning heads. Despite having no music online, the three piece (composed of singer/bassist Margaret McCarthy, guitarist Ben Cruz and drummer Emerson Hunton) began playing in their adoptive city in 2019 with only a pair of Bandcamp demos to their name and quickly started appearing on bills with buzzing acts like Strange Ranger, Horsejumper of Love and Paear. This led to them capturing the attention of the rising Chicago label Born Yesterday (helmed by Deeper‘s Kevin Fairbairn and the increasingly ubiquitous engineer Greg Obis), who have recently garnered an expanding national profile with releases from DIY circuit up and comers Landowner and Cafe Racer. Today, Moontype are announcing their signing to the label with their single “Ferry” which is premiering via The FADER.

WATCH: Moontype’s “Ferry” video on YouTube // FADER

The track, described by FADER as “a gauzy Midwest fantasy,” is an arresting example of Moontype’s sound, one that is startlingly fully-realized for a band who have yet to release their first album, and of a songwriter in McCarthy with a rare ability to communicate her perspective with a relatable clarity and a transporting depth. There are suggestions of the intimate songwriterly-ness of Tomberlin or Lomelda, blended with the sweeping, technically-minded indie of Built To Spill, and even hints of the downbeat grandeur of Mazzy Star in a track that sees McCarthy relate the alienating feeling of a gradually dissipating friendship. Immediately engaging and emotionally acute, it’s the kind of sure-handed first offering that provides a tantalizing suggestion of what’s to come from an extremely promising new band.

“‘Ferry’ is a song about the loss of friendship, not when it breaks apart quickly and devastatingly but when it slowly unravels and you watch it go,” McCarthy explains to FADER. “3 or 4 of my friendships made their way into this song. I think about a friend who was about to go on a two-year long tour, and I started to drift away from him months before he actually left – a trick the mind plays to make the break less painful. Your friend leaves and afterwards you’re left with these visceral memories – running around the city at night, drinking whiskey in the alley – and in memory form those experiences gain potency, like ‘ah that was really living, and what I have now is nothing.’ And that vivid memory stands in high contrast to the way their entire personhood is slowly fading from your mind, you forget how they walk, what kind of jokes they made. And then you’re left with only yourself and you realize that you’ve defined yourself through the relationships you’ve been in, and when those people go away you feel like an empty shell (no snail inside!) and that feeling is enough to make a person say ‘I wanna take the ferry to Michigan! Get me out of this place!’”

“Ferry” is available to purchase on Bandcamp.

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Special Interest announce remix of “The Passion of…” album due next month.

Following the release of their album ‘The Passion Of…‘ earlier this year, New Orleans-based punk band Special Interest have announced a new 12″ release ‘Street Pulse Beat‘, which features remixes from Boy Harsher, Ruth Mascelli and DJ Haram. The record is set for release on Jan 8th via Nude Club Records and is available for pre-order and today the “Street Pulse Beat (Boy Harsher Remix)” is streaming online.

As well as the ‘Street Pulse Beat’ Maxi 12″, Special Interest will also digitally release ‘The Passion Of: Remixed‘ on Jan 8th, which is made up of 11 tracks, including the remixes on the 12″ & various other reworks by artists such as Hide & w00dy. People who purchase the Maxi 12” on Bandcamp, will receive a free download of ‘The Passion Of Remixed’ too.

All proceeds will go to House of Tulip (https://houseoftulip.org), which was co-founded and is currently co-led by 2 Black transgender women. House of Tulip provides trans and gender-nonconforming communities in New Orleans, Louisiana with economic stability and safety through zero barrier permanent housing and pathways to education, healthcare, employment, and homeownership.

“This remix of ‘Street Pulse Beat’ came from the depths of springtime lockdown. In a bleak and uncertain world, Special Interest was keeping our creative spirit alive. This remix was made entirely with the OB-6, SH-101, and the JV-1080. Trading in distorted guitars for plucky bent synths, Boy Harsher’s remix offers their signature melancholy sound. Ali Logout’ confidently controls the energy, reminding us that synthwave can still have a backbone and can hang with the punks.” – Boy Harsher

Adding to this, Special Interest vocalist Alli Logout said the track is “A ballad for lovers delusions of grandeur in the depth of the terror that is codependency.”

Listen to “Street Pulse Beat (Boy Harsher Remix)” here: https://youtu.be/WtwwtZHcxFw

Pre-order here: https://specialinterestno.bandcamp.com/album/the-passion-of-remixed

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Gustaf release new single – “Design”

Since forming in 2018, Brooklyn art punks Gustaf have been the subject of an unusual amount of buzz for a band who had never released a note of recorded music. Based entirely on the back of their live shows, the band found early champions in luminaries like Beck – who saw them perform at a secret loft party he played around the release of his latest album – the New York no wave legend James Chance, and shared stages with buzzing indie acts like Omni, Tropical Fuck Storm, Dehd and Bodega, while word of mouth led to sell out shows when they played their first LA headline dates in late 2019. Last month the band released their first single, the Chris Coady (Beach House, TV on The Radio, Future Islands)-produced “Mine,” which earned immediate praise from spots like the NME, Paste, DIY, The Needle Drop and Exclaim, and today, Gustaf are sharing their second single, a track called “Design,” another slice of the band’s finely-tuned, off-kilter art-punk that sees them reunite with Coady as their producer.

WATCH: Gustaf’s “Design” video on YouTube

Vocalist Lydia Gammill explains: “Although the title of the song is not the refrain (“desire’”, we named the track “Design” because it is a commentary on how our desires and critiques of others are a product of our design.” Gammill continues, “Like in “Mine”, the narrator addresses an invisible critic, arguing that the ills we believe to be unique to ourselves are the result of an oppressive system. However, in the end we’re just shouting at the back of someone’s head as they leave the room.”

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shame take a “Snow Day” on their new single.

Today, shame present a new single, “Snow Day,” off of their long-anticipated new album, Drunk Tank Pink, out January 15th on Dead Oceans. It follows previously released singles “Water in the Well” and “Alphabet.” Alongside, the band share a visualiser featuring drone footage shot in the Scottish Borders, where the band wrote Drunk Tank Pink. Additionally, shame announce a live broadcast from Rough Trade in London on January 14th.

The rolling, snow-covered hills make a befitting backdrop for the atmospheric build of “Snow Day,” with frontman Charlie Steen’s sombre and introspective opening words making way for the storming twists and turns that arrive throughout. The song is a standout on the record, carried by the rhythmic, unrelenting drumming from Charlie Forbes, with chiming guitars which dictate the mood changes and push and pull the song into different directions. Steen’s lyrics dovetail with the music all the while; from its reflective opening to the snarl of its highest points. Undoubtedly it’s the band’s most musically ambitious release to date; a symphony in a song. Charlie Steen explains: “A lot of this album focuses on the subconscious and dreams, this song being the pivotal moment of these themes. A song about love that is lost and the comfort and displeasure that comes after you close your eyes, fall into sleep, and are forced to confront yourself.”
WATCH SHAME’S VISUALIZER FOR “SNOW DAY”
“Snow Day,” like the rest of the tracks making up Drunk Tank Pink, marks a determined leap forward for shame. The tracks began life as the band readjusted to a new normal back home having spent much of their adult life on tour, with themes spanning disintegrating relationships, the loss of the sense of self and identity crises. The result is an enormous expansion of shame’s sonic arsenal.
WATCH SHAME’S VIDEO FOR “WATER IN THE WELL”

WATCH VIDEO FOR “BiL”

WATCH VIDEO FOR “ALPHABET”

PRE-ORDER DRUNK PINK TANK

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Miss Grit announces new EP for February 2021 and invites us to the “Dark Side of the Party” on her new single.

Miss Grit, moniker of Korean-American musician Margaret Sohn, announces her Impostor EP, out February 5th, and presents its lead single “Dark Side Of The Party.” Sohn makes relatable songs that masterfully dissect the feeling of self-doubt. Her songs can drastically shift from delicate to explosive as they show her technical prowess as a guitarist and melodist, and her evocative lyricism. On the heels of her Talk Talk EP, a “truly awe-inspiring first work” (NME), Impostor is a six song collection that’s more cathartic, resolute, and fully documents the array of talents she brings as a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and producer.

Throughout Impostor, Sohn explores the titular “impostor syndrome” that so often characterizes the insecurities of the early 20s. The songs address her life-long navigation through the racial impostor syndrome she experienced as a half-Korean girl “trying to fit into the white space” of the Michigan suburbs where she grew up. Not even a move to New York City, where she studied music technology at NYU and began to dream of creating effects pedals for a living, could ease her internal conflict. Part of that uneasiness for Sohn was her initial success with Talk Talk and the feeling “she was someone who was impersonating a musician.” Her solution was producing the EP by herself at Brooklyn’s Virtue and Vice Studios so that she had complete creative control.

Throughout Impostor, the sound moves from dirty and aggressive to hypnotic and ethereal. The inventive “Dark Side Of The Party” boasts fuzzed-out riffs and synth theatrics, and is an anthem for feeling out of place at a party full of surface-level conversations and ulterior motives. She sings, “I can’t tell hearts apart from spare parts/I try, I try, I try/Why can’t I?” “I’ve gone my whole life feeling really uncomfortable defining myself,” Sohn says. “I realized that a lot of the time, I’m more comfortable with other people defining me and making up their mind about who I’m supposed to be.” Writing this EP helped her understand that futile pattern. Miss Grit is a project that allows Sohn to break through self-bias, creating a version of herself that doesn’t need to be limited. Expressing herself through her powerful, confident music while still being vulnerable about her insecurities is a dynamic that characterizes her work, with all of its pushes and pulls of emotion. Ultimately, Sohn says, the Impostor EP is about feeling self-doubt, working through it with music, and letting it all subside.
Listen to “Dark Side Of The Party”

Pre-save Impostor EP

Impostor EP Tracklist
1.Don’t Wander
2. Buy The Banter
3. Blonde
4. Grow Up To
5. Dark Side Of The Party
6. Impostor

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Nana Yamato asks “If” on her new single.

Tokyo-based musician Nana Yamato announces her debut album, Before Sunrise, out February 5th on Dull Tools, and presents the lead single/video “If.” By day, Yamato is an ordinary girl who marches anonymously between her flat, her school and her job. But by night, she becomes something else — a young artist and record collector whose urge for connection and expression has created one of the best underground pop records to come out of Japan, and elsewhere for that matter. Her calling was found when one day she entered Big Love Records in Harajuku, Tokyo to buy an Iceage album. She then began going there everyday after school, where her studies shifted to the week’s latest indie rock releases. “Everything in my life started there.”

Yamato’s brilliance lies in a profound imagination that confronts the isolation and claustrophobia of Tokyo life, without losing grasp of the whimsy and romance of girlhood. It’s hard to ignore the romance the artist has with the streets that she walks; Japanese and English vocals sing about the lights and sounds of the city, as if there’s no place else she could exist. Each song on Before Sunrise is a secret hidden in the late-night glow of a young girl’s bedroom, created in the precious witching hours of the teenage heart, before dawn returns with the tedious demands of adulthood. Dreams, and the language of living inside one’s imagination, are the prevailing theme of Before Sunrise. Yamato describes her style as “critical fantasy,” a fitting label for a sound that exists as much in a carefree daydream as they do in a crowded subway.

Throughout lead single “If,” a collage of drum machine, grungy guitar and synth are the terrain over which Nana’s voice floats. Singing in Japanese and English, her words are delivered with a cool confidence, as if fearlessly navigating a bizarre dreamscape. On “If,” Nana Yamato defines a new idiom of city music. Much in the way trip-hop articulated the nightlife of Bristol and London, she scores the soundtrack of an imaginative introvert wandering a crowded metropolis, hiding in plain sight in the hazy glow of neon. For the video, Yamato studied patterns of various animals and traced them frame by frame, making nearly 200 drawings. “The video is set up with me as an up-and-coming cartoonist who’s on deadline,” Nana explains. “She falls asleep while thinking about the comic. In her dreams, she meets the characters she created. She gets lost in her own imaginary world. My work is realistic fantasy, or critical fantasy. It’s not about fantasizing to escape reality, but about fighting reality by fantasizing.”

Nana’s debut LP, much like her previous 7” records released under the ANNA moniker, is a strictly DIY affair. Yamato sings and plays guitar, creates beats and MIDI melodies, in addition to creating the drawings and design of the LP itself. Produced by P.E.’sJonathan Schenke, who has worked with Parquet Courts, Liars, and Surfbort, among others, Before Sunrise marks the arrival of an artist who has found her voice. She is not just the pupil of the new arrivals bin, but of a life spent as a defiant dreamer, in the secret world that begins after childhood and before sunrise.
Watch Nana Yamato’s Video for “If”

Pre-order Before Sunrise
Big Cartel
Bandcamp

Before Sunrise Tracklist
1.Do You Wanna
2. If
3. Burning Desire
4. Gaito
5. Dreamwanderer
6. Fantasy
7. Polka Dot Bells
8. Before Sunrise
9. Voyage et Merci
10. Under The Cherry Moon
11. Morning Street
12. The Day Song

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Matt Sweeney and Bonnie “Prince” Billy encourage us to “Make Worry for Me” with their new single.

An apparition you can’t explain is cutting through the viscous mist in your brain. The contents of your pockets are suddenly unfamiliar. That sound again –

This year of super wolf moon brought A Visitation and the message, “You’ll Get Eaten, Too.”Now, in the earthly chaos of total celestial blackout, one body containing two galaxies is once more among us…

This is no miscount – this is the bestial duo, the two headed dawg, the Superwolves: Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, talking directly to our face. They know no fear, only curiosity. “Make Worry For Me” is manifesto, and we can only hope to learn from it. To grow from it. For limbs to extend, beneath its blue, electric sky. To become Super, like the Superwolves.

The gauntlet is thrown. You’re dancing with the wolf again. Brooding and grooving upon their prey. Succumb to their ritual. Move your ass. Sing their song. Fight. Or die.

Listen to Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s “Make Worry For Me”

“Make Worry For Me” credits:
lyrics and vocals by Will Oldham
music composed by Matt Sweeney
vocal harmonies, electric and bass guitars by Matt Sweeney
drums by Pete Townsend
keys by Mike Rojas
recorded by David Ferguson
mixed by Sean Sullivan

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