Brothers Ben and Conor McCarthy, otherwise known as Roi Turbo, have been crafting their South African disco-funk since they were teenagers and sharing a bedroom they turned into a DIY studio. Now, with their second EP, Bazooka, they’ve added more funk, more grooves, and even vocal tracks to their mix.
The title track gleams and shines with instant catch-your-attention synth riffs and a beat that will have you strutting down the street. “Dystopia” adds some slight synthwave touches that are great, but it never stops being danceable, despite the track’s title leading you to believe it’s going to be morose or gothic.
“Super Hands” is a standout, somehow blending stuff that sounds like it’s from old Nintendo games with alien-disco, Italo disco, and acid-funk. “Bobo Spirit” is the bounciest track on the EP. It just bumps the entire time.
“Hot Like Fire” is their first vocal track. There aren’t a lot of vocals, mind you, but the McCarthy brothers use them to good effect to help the grooves stick in your head, shoulders, and hips.
It’s a fun record that’s ready for your summer playlists. Go grab it.
The press release I got for Fugue State‘s new album, In the Lurch, described it as sounding like it’s “broadcast through a warped transistor radio from another dimension.” That’s a good way to put it. It’s a wild album that blends punk, jazz, garage rock, and other things I’m still trying to define…but should I bother?
After all, vocalist and guitarist Shane Bruno has said that the lead track (and single), “Moot Point,” is “not meant to be taken entirely seriously” — even though it’s a song about questioning your place in the universe. Perhaps that is the moot point: We’re all floating on a speck of dust in infinite space, so why are we so worried about everything?
Gage O’Brien‘s opening bass on the title track is like the sound of a muscle car engine roaring to life. The rest of the track is that same car tearing through a junkyard wall. “The Pipeline” combines surf and psych along with some weirdo rock and makes a somewhat spooky brew. “Mundane Man” is bonkers, as Bruno shreds his guitar and rolls his eyes at a dude who can’t stop talking about himself.
Drummer Jonathan Hanson goes nuts on the punky-funky “I’ll Keep It in Mind,” making you want to sign him up for your next punk band. “Facts” sounds like Osees making a weird surf album. “Joie de Vivre” is wonderfully warped. Bruno’s guitar sounds like he’s running it through at least three pedals and maybe even an old sewing machine.
“Connecticut Girls” reminds me of Dead Kennedys with its distorted vocals about picking up girls and surf-influenced garage punk sound. “I Don’t Wanna Be Here” could be the theme of the day, week, year, decade, country, and / or planet. O’Brien’s synths (and the horns!) on the closer, “Abscess,” are a neat touch, taking the song back and forth from Hasil Adkins weirdness to Julian Cope-level strangeness.
This is one of the wildest records I’ve heard all year so far. I need to see these guys live. It must be bonkers.
Keep your mind open.
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Sextile’s new album, yes, please. is a floor-filling, club-shaking banger that encourages us to embrace life and not let the bastards get us down. It’s a record that skewers misogyny, politics in general, the United States’ health care and education systems, and the music industry…all while giving you a rave freak-out.
After the early 2000s video game opening credits-like “Intro,” we’re let in on the not-so-secret information that “Women Respond to Bass,” with Melissa Scaduto and Brady Keehn instantly making you sweat within the first throbbing bass riff. This song will make you want to turn your lights on and off at rapid pace to simulate a strobe light if you don’t already have one within arm’s reach. Keehn takes over lead vocals on “Freak Eyes,” in which he sings about the pressure of making the album just as good, if not better, than the last, and to make it now (“I’m trying to get my shit together. People say I should be working faster.”). The warped sounds are probably reflective of how his brain felt at the time.
“Penny Rose” delves into what schools and education will become in the near-future thanks to AI and carefully chosen subject matter. Hip hop artists everywhere will want to steal the beats and bass on this. “Push Ups,” with guest vocals from Jehnny Beth, builds and builds until your workout becomes a mid-1990s aerobic VHS tape played in fast-forward. Speaking of fast-forward, wait until you hear the bass on “Kids,” which seems to be going faster than anything else on the album. It’s pure trance music that will lift you off the floor (and listen for the additional vocals by Izzy Glaudini of Automatic).
“99 Bongos” is a fun one, with the titular drums slapping down sick beats while synths never seem to stop rising around them and someone tells a tale of tripping on acid and taking a road trip they were lucky to survive. “S is For” has Scaduto spitting a sexy tongue-twister that is probably being played in S&M clubs even now. “Rearrange” calls out how many things have been changed for everyone, and not for the better for most of us. Scaduto’s vocals sound like they’re coming through a staticky radio tuned to a pirate channel. Its sister song, “Resist,” calls / yells for women to fight for their reproductive and health rights. The pulsating bass on it is fuel for action.
“Is this it? Is there something I’m missin’?” Keehn sings on “Kiss.” He’s wondering what the hell happened around here, how did he end up in the middle of it, and what does he do now? Apparently, you dance until you’re a sweaty mess because the last half of the track is a full-on industrial ripper.
If you’re wondering why so much of this album is about calls to action and to embrace life and, let’s face it, pleasure, part of it is because Scaduto spent a good chunk of time before this album was recorded in a New York nursing home after an accident that almost caused the loss of a leg. “Hospital” and “Soggy Newports” detail the experience, with “Hospital” being the wild synth-wave dance cut about her trying to figure out why health care is such a damn mess, and “Soggy Newports” being the low-key song about how health care can be so damn depressing (“Please get me out of here, because I’m going out of my head.”).
If you’re looking for a hot dance record, look no further. If you’re looking for a sexy record, look no further. If you’re looking for a boring record, look elsewhere.
Last March, Brooklyn’s Punchlove released their debut LP Channelson Kanine Records. Composed of multi-instrumentalists Jillian Olesen, Joey Machina, Ian Lange-McPherson, and visual artIst viz_wel, the group’s debut earned praise from outlets like Stereogum, Bandcamp, FLOOD and Paste, who called the album “one of the most compelling shoegaze debuts in recent memory” and included the album on their Best Debut Albums of 2024 list.
The album’s reception has paved the way for a busy start to 2025 for the band, who have already toured across the UK and Europe, and will be heading out in the US later this month. Last month, they also released a new single called “(sublimate)” that teased a promising new direction for the band. The track moved beyond the shoegaze swirl of their debut, introducing layers of glitchy electronics and a heavier sound, a wave of industrial-inflected noise pop that Consequence called “further proof of the Brooklyn-based outfit’s proclivity for tasteful disturbance.“
Where every Punchlove release to date has been self-produced, “Today You Can Learn The Secret” was co-produced with Xav Sinden. As Olesen explains, the track was inspired by an experiment in automatism that led to a revelation about the way her digital life had been impacting her subconciously.
Olesen says of the track:
This release is a surrealist, portal fantasy-inspired encounter with the unconscious mind. This latest song started with just the title itself (“Today You Can Learn the Secret”), and then Ian wrote all the instrumental parts. When it came time to write the lyrics, I had started leaving an open notebook next to my bed each night as a creative exercise in automatism I’d read about somewhere and basically started waking up to find all kinds of scribbles and chicken scratch all over the pages each morning. It was like scary psychological Christmas each morning. At times there was really raw stuff in there. It kinda freaked me out, but it was also exciting and really started to shift my perspective on my own humanity, as well as the world around me. It felt like I had a new window into understanding how certain things were really affecting me, and to start grasping the nuances of how I had been unknowingly absorbing and filtering my (excessively digital) daily stimuli on an unconscious level, from which I could begin to make real changes. So outlining my own experience and some of the recurring themes of these bizarre dream entries, O is the journey of moving from an outward facing, always-on, digital world in towards the deepest, darkest, realms of ourselves, where we are found face-to-face with our own humanity and mortality in new and unexpected ways.
Elle Barbara is an avant-garde singer-songwriter, recording artist, and performer based in Montreal, Quebec. Her music alternately combines elements of sophisti-pop, jazz, and glam, with an interest in library music and psychedelic soul. She has become an iconic and ubiquitous presence in Montreal, as comfortable at the DIY art show as she is performing with Madonna.
Rising from artist-run spaces at the turn of the 2010s, Elle Barbara has seen her work soar to enduring albeit niche acclaim, in a part-time artistic career whose highlights include duets with Lætitia Sadier and Sean Nicholas Savage. In the later half of the 2010s, Elle Barbara’s efforts mostly centered around community organizing and solidarity work. She notably helped establish an anti-poverty grassroots collective whose mission was to grant discretionary funds to low-income trans feminine people, and did peer work to promote harm reduction methods and offer active listening and legal support to society’s most vulnerable. She mainly releases music as Elle Barbara’s Black Space, a concept group she formed to feel less culturally isolated in Montreal’s underground. She is also partly responsible for reviving Montreal’s ballroom scene.
Today, Elle is announcing her American debut, Word On The Street, which will be out June 27th on Celluloid Lunch, K Records / Perennial / K and Elle’s own House of Barbara. To mark the announce, Elle is sharing the single and video for her track “Hitler, Satan & Associates LLP.”
Word on Street was written, composed, arranged, and produced by Elle Barbara, in close collaboration with Renny Wilson, who recorded, engineered, and mixed the album over a challenging 8-year arc that saw Elle transition socially and medically while on welfare and frequently eating off as little as $11 CAD per week. In that sense, Word on the Street is a victory against class struggle and nepotism, and is a brazen testament to how a low-income, welfare-assisted, middle-aged, Black male-to-female transsexual beat the odds, using all resources to make the music of her mind while ignoring music industry conventions.
The albums is a genre-defying concept album that promises to become a cult classic and solidify Elle Barbara’s reputation as an uncompromising auteur, champion of queer eccentricity, all-around visionary, and working-class heroine.
Each track on the album conjures up unique pictures composed of seemingly incongruous images such as corrupt justice systems, aliens, industrial food production, religious fanaticism, and the Montreal Canadiens hockey team.
As such, “Hitler, Satan and Associates LLP” makes an excellent introduction to the album, as Elle explains:
“Hitler, Satan & Associates LLP is a psychedelic avant-pop number with elements of free jazz. The lyrics are about as absurd as the economic times we live in.”
Recorded in 2022 while they had some extra days in Los Angeles after the end of a U.S. west coast tour, Holy Wave got together with Osees‘ Tomas Dolas and knocked out a few singles…and then a couple more when they realized they had the makings of a groovy EP on their hands. That became the Studio 22 Singles and B-Sides album.
The opening drum fill by Julian Ruiz on “chaparral” immediately drops you into lovely headspace, and Kyle Hager‘s slightly distant vocals and sunlight-breaking-through-the-clouds synths guide you along a river made of melted ice cream. “time crisis too” is even brighter and lusher, with Hager’s synths sounding like a backing choir and Joey Cook‘s acoustic guitar work feeling like a happy cat prancing around your house as the sun rises.
The acoustic guitars return for “cowprint” — a song about being fascinated by a potential lover and watching them from afar. The song transforms by the second half into a synth and electric piano-driven bit of mellow psych-rock. Speaking of mellow, the delightful “father’s prayer” will be your new favorite 1970s toe-tapper…and it was made in 2022!
“bog song” floats along like cat tail fluff over a bog on a bright day. Cook’s guitar solo on it is never forceful, but centers the whole track, and Ryan Fuson‘s piano takes you by the hand and along all the safe places to walk in the bog. Fuson is subtly and cleverly all over the background of the record, actually, adding details (with multiple instruments) that would cause the songs to sound odd if they were absent.
I love that the albums ends (after the brief, slightly goofy “away here”) with an almost meditative instrumental — “string performer.” It’s just guitars, synths, piano, quiet bass, and little, if any, percussion. It’s lovely.
The whole record is. They captured a neat moment when recording this, and thanks to them for sharing it with us.
I was already onboard for Death Hilarious, the new album by Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, when I heard the first single, “Detroit,” in November 2024. Then, they unveiled this wild album cover and I knew we were in for a(nother) treat from them.
The album begins with a song about a problem lead singer and lyricist Matthew Baty had going into the album – (Writer’s) “Blockage.” “I’m staring straight ahead, infinitely bored,” he sings to begin the track. He’s not sure what he has left to say. Thankfully for all of us, and his shredding / pounding bandmates, he realized a bit of Zen in that the emptiness of the universe (and his brain) contains everything.
The stomping anger of “Detroit” is like the sensation of watching a lit bomb fuse slowly burning toward its deadly payload and Baty tells us, “Everyone leaves. You’re all the same. I’m not the one to blame.” John-Michael Hedley‘s bass hits extra hard on “Collider,” while lead guitarist Adam Ian Sykes pays homage to his British heavy metal idols throughout it and Baty sings about existential dread.
“Stitches” has been compared to some Motörhead tracks, but it hits more like Blue Öyster Cult for me. It’s a ripper either way, with Sykes and producer / fellow guitarist Sam Grant trading killer riffs and Ewan Mackenzie nailing some of his biggest fills and cymbal crashes on it (His subtle ride cymbal hits will make you think, “Damn, dude, that’s not fair.”).
Just when you think you might have them figured out, they bring in El-P for a guest rap on “Glib Tongued” — quite possibly the darkest hip hop track you’ll hear this year. “The Wyrm” is one of the album’s longest track at just over seven minutes (which, compared to when the band was putting out songs three times that length, is a warmup for them) and crushes the entire time. It feels like a truck has hit you when it really kicks in around the 2:15 mark.
“Carousel” has Baty feeling like he’s spinning in circles and trying to get off the titular ride the world has become in the last few years. The guitars on “Coyote Call” rocket into cosmic rock riffs while the drums and bass are practically terraforming a new planet underneath you. As if that wasn’t heavy enough, the final track, “Toecurler,” is like an avalanche you first see at a distance and think is moving like a slow mudslide, but find out, too late, that it’s roaring down at you like a shattered ancient mountain…and the stoner-funk breakdown about seven-and-a-half minutes into it? Genius.
The whole album has this heavy FAFO sound to it. The band has said they wanted the album to be rougher and, no past-album-pun intended, visceral than their psych-doom album Land of Sleeper, and it certainly delivers. You can live, laugh, and love all you like, but the porcine septet are here to remind you that you’re gonna die, and it might be hilarious when you do.
Looking for some fun house music? Well, the Danish duo of Liminal has you covered with the Keep Coming BackEP, which features three different mixes of the main track.
The bass alone on “Keep Coming Back to Me” will keep you coming back to it, not to mention the lush grooves of the whole thing. Ray Mang‘s remix of it ups the space disco feel of it to make it perfect for your next space age bachelor pad get-together.
“The Moon is Changing” is trippy house, almost trip-hop stuff, that you’ll want the next time you’re settling in for a make-out session. Ray Mang returns on the end of Side B for a re-edit of his own remix to make it more robotic and quirky.
It’s fun stuff. Throw it into your next house party mix.
Keep your mind open.
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Have you ever been in a tense situation where you have to remind yourself to breathe? When panic makes you hold your breath for so long that your body locks into place? When the tension is wound up like a jack-in-the-box just short of popping open?
Apparently, that’s what DITZ were experiencing when making their sharp sophomore album Never Exhale. The opening notes of “V70” instantly drop that tension on you, like some kind of rumbling alarm warning you to get back before you get hurt, because the razor-sharp guitar and snarling bass-driven “Taxi Man” might knock you off your feet. It’s an homage to the working class and how often the people you barely notice are holding the world together. “Space / Smile” is almost a manic rant about hatred and division hidden behind friendly faces.
“This house has no place in your future…Wake up and see what you built will never last!” yells lead singer Cal Francis on “Senor Siniestro” – a wild exploration of what’s real (almost nothing) and what’s impermanent (everything). I love Sam Evans‘ beats on “Four,” which start simple and grow into post-punk precision. Anton Mocock and Jack Looker‘s guitars on “God on a Speed Dial” sound like the hulls of ships being torn open by sea mines while Francis wonders how to be heard by something or someone beyond this world.
They take on the weird inevitable nature (Or is it threat?) of aging on “Smells Like Something Died in Here.” The guitars sigh as if they’re settling down for a long rest that might not end. “18 Wheeler” is the sound of madness bubbling under the surface that cracks through the ice now and then. It almost sounds like each band member is playing their own solo and barely paying attention to the others at times, and it still works well.
Caleb Remnant‘s bass leads “The Body As a Structure” – a song about finding comfort in your own skin while the world shakes around you. The album ends with the left-turn slow-down of “Britney” – which is also the longest song on the album at nearly seven-and-a-half minutes. Evans’ hi-hat at first sounds like it’s wrapped in cotton, and the guitar chords merge with dark synths to create something unsettling as Francis chants “We build and we build and we build.” again and again in the song’s second half, pulling us into a head-spinning nightmare.
You don’t get many breaths with this album. It grabs you and holds you in place, sometimes with fascination and other times with paranoia. DITZ wants you to take a breath, but not to relax.
In case you weren’t aware, Seattle’s KEXP is one of the best radio stations out there for music lovers. Part of the reason is that they present so many great live performances from so many artists in different genres. They also host, and broadcast, full live concerts. Some of them are even released for us to consume afterwards, like the newest Live at KEXPrecord from psychedelic rippers Frankie and The Witch Fingers.
FATW go back to their (near) beginning by opening with the title track from their Brain Telephone album. Nikki Pickle‘s bass is a snarling beast, and it’s easy to lose track of whose guitar sounds like it’s already falling apart – Dylan Sizemore‘s or Josh Menashe‘s. Just when you think the whole song and set is going to be wild noise, they drop into their funk grooves that they do so well. “Futurephobic” starts and stops on a dime, leaving you a bit bewildered by the end.
“Syster System” struts around the stage like an unearthed Thin Lizzy track stretching its muscles and staking a claim on rock and roll. “Cops & Robbers” is almost a psychobilly track with the wild lyrics about bank robbery and Nick Aguilar‘s punk drumming, and then it dissolves / oozes into the slime-punky “Sidewalk.” “Weird Dog” snaps back and forth between garage rock funk and crunchy punk kerplunk that your neck might snap.
Jon Modaff is a welcome addition to the FATWF lineup on synths, and his work on “i-Candy” almost brings the band into spooky rock / haunted house terror music. In other words, more cool stuff the band pulls off with ease. The longest cut, “Empire,” has become a fan favorite of their live shows as it lets each band member shine at different times and always belts you hard in the chest.
The concert, and album, ends with “Bonehead” – a raucous rocker made for pogo-dancing and kicking down doors and, well, boneheads…and good grief, Menashe’s solo is manic. The whole song, and (again) the album, practically has you sweating just from hearing it. It, like seeing them in the flesh, will leave you invigorated.
