February 2023 – Page 3 – 7th Level Music

Tanukichan teams up with Enumclaw on “Thin Air.”

In November, Tanukichan announced their sophomore LP GIZMO (out March 3rd via Company Records). A project led by Hannah van Loon, in collaboration with the Grammy-nominated chillwave pioneer Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi, their album is the follow up to their debut LP, Sundays, arelease that saw an enthusiastic response when it was released in 2018, earning praise from outlets like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, FADER, Stereogum, Loud & Quiet and The AV Club.

The album’s lead single “Don’t Give Up“ was greeted with excitement upon its release, earning best of the week nods from outlets like MTV and Pitchfork, and today Tanukichan are sharing a second single from the album, a track called “Thin Air” that features Aramis Johnson of the Tacoma, Washington band Enumclaw. To coincide with the single’s release van Loon has spoken to Stereogum about the new album.

LISTEN
to Tanukichan’s “Thin Air” feat. Enumclaw
HERE

READ
Stereogum’s Interview w/ Tanukichan
HERE

“This song is about exes, some people that I really cared about but ultimately didn’t want to be with,” van Loon explains. “The sadness I feel when I’m hurting someone, and missing them and knowing you won’t ever have that closeness again. It’s about how important they are and how much they’ve taught me, or helped me, but how I also know that people come and go. The chorus has a double meaning for me where I feel like I can’t prioritize relationships because I need to keep on focusing on myself. The other is feeling like I’m broken and keep ending up with the wrong people, and hurting them.”

——–

GIZMO is named after van Loon’s, who became a much-needed companion while the Bay Area musician wrote her second album as the pandemic began. The album is an exercise in release, whether from situational hindrances — a forced lockdown, for one — or from self-imposed hedonistic coping mechanisms. “A theme I always had floating around was escape,” van Loon explains of her follow-up to 2018’s Sundays. “Escaping from myself, my problems, sadness and cycles.”

To channel the more uplifting spirit she wanted for GIZMO, van Loon turned to the radio pop-rock of her childhood: “I was struck by the in-your-face positivity of the lyrics,” she adds, referencing artists like 311, The Cranberries, and Tom Petty. “I wanted to bring that positivity while writing about the sad and helpless emotions I’d been grappling with.”

This new found positivity and interesting blend of influences are in evidence on “Don’t Give Up,” a nu metal-meets-Cocteau Twins groove that deals with the experience of trying to overcome imposter syndrome, as van Loon explains:

“This song is about feeling I haven’t done anything with my life, but also knowing that I’ve accomplished a lot and it’s only getting better. I started writing the lyrics when I was on tour opening for the Drums after my first album came out. We were playing sold out shows in front of hundreds of people, but I knew it could change in an instant. I felt like I hit rock bottom emotionally, I wasn’t ready for the road and it killed me. I felt so disconnected from the band even though they were my backbone and were making it happen. The only thing that really helps me at that point is feeling like I can just let everything go, and we all die. Just accepting the fact that I can’t control anything and that in the end it doesn’t matter. We will all disappear. I wrote the chorus years later when I was finishing a bunch of the songs. I didn’t want it to be depressing, even though that’s where it came from. It came from giving up but I wanted to keep going. I wanted it to mean something moving on from the negative and I came up with a ridiculously positive chorus. Don’t give up now you know there’s another day, just know you’re going to get to a better place, a better place meaning a better place in life, or “heaven,” just nothingness where all your worries are gone.”

GIZMO will be released on Company Records on March 3rd. It is available for preorder/presave here.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Tom at Hive Mind PR.]

The Jackets explore the “Misery of Man” ahead of their upcoming tour.

December 2022 saw the announcement of Wild Noise Records and its debut vinyl release from The Jackets with the single “Pie In The Sky.” Today, the single’s B-side “Misery of Man” is premiering via Vive Le Rock in addition to a slew of European tour dates beginning this month.

Hear “Misery of Man” through Vive Le Rock

Chris Rosales explains the context behind the songwriting. “Misery of Man” is a song about humans’ strongest feelings and how overwhelming they can be for good or evil. Pain, fear, love, hate; these emotions can guide us into strange and sometimes perilous directions. This is Man’s misery – our misery and dealing with these emotions can seldom be simple. (Chris Rosales – 2023)
“Pie In The Sky/”Misery of Man” is The Jacket’s follow-up to their acclaimed Queen Of The Pill album and one of two confirmed 7″ releases for 2023. A cross-continental production, the band entered Shirt-Off Studio in Bern with Sebastian Zwahlen to helm the recording process and enlisting notable Detroit producer Jim Diamond to handle the mixing and mastering process. The artwork is the creation of the Bucharest-based animator Andy “Sinboy” Luke.

Since Queen of the Pill‘s release, The Jackets have maintained momentum through tours across the European Union, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Mexico. No strangers to the European festival circuit as well, crowds that have witnessed the band’s aerodynamic and raucous live spectacle include Funtastic Dracula (ES), Cosmic Trip (FR), Purple Weekend (ES), Festival Beat (IT), EuroYeyé (ES), and Hipsville A Go Go (UK).

“Pie In The Sky” is available digitally through all digital service providers and will be released on vinyl in March 2023 via Wild Noise Records. Pre-orders are available here.

The Jackets Upcoming Tour Dates

February 9th: Blah Blah (Turin, IT)
February 10th: Cloud 9 Weekender (Rimini, IT)
February 11th: Joshua Blues (Como, IT)
March 1st: Rössli (Bern, CH) w/Nestter Donuts + DJ Bone
March 2nd: Schüür (Lucerne, CH) w/Nestter Donuts + DJ Bone
March 3rd: Cafe Mokka (Thun, CH) w/Nestter Donuts + DJ Bone
March 4th: Amboss Rampe (Zürich, CH) w/Nestter Donuts + DJ Bone
March 30th: Irrsinn Bar (Basel, CH)
March 31st: Gaswerk (Winterthur, CH)
April 14th: Wild Weekend (Mallorca, ES) w/Reverend Beat-Man, Holly Golightly, The Sex Organs, The Brood, The Stompin’ Riffraff, and more.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Matthew at Shattered Platter PR.]

Review: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava

You might expect King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard‘s album Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava to start out with some sort of massive cosmic metal track when you look at the album’s cover, but KGATLW are well-known for doing the unexpected, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the album starts off with a groovy, saxophone-tooting jam track (“Mycelium”) instead.

It’s a big jam album. The whole thing was recorded in a week with almost no planning. The band started each track with a tempo, a title, and a key signature. That’s it. They’d just improvise on those things for a few hours, and then frontman Stuart Mackenzie would later go back and arrange the jams into songs, and the band would write lyrics to fit them. Yeah, it’s nuts, but it’s just the kind of thing KGATLW love to do (and make look easy).

“Ice V” (pronounced “Ice Five”) is one of the best cuts on the record. It’s a snappy psych-funk song about aliens, crop circles, and other cosmic entities that’s helped along by Michael Cavanagh‘s wickedly tight snare hits. The subtle use of Ambrose Kenny-Smith‘s saxophone in the background is another nice touch.

“Magma” dips a bit into the cosmic rock you expect from the album cover, and it also dips into the band’s love of microtonal instrumentation. “Lava”is a psychedelic trip that ripples and flows like its namesake as Mackenzie sings about life and death and what can represent each.

“Hell’s Itch” is the longest track on the album at over thirteen minutes (which can be considered a warm-up for KGATLW by this point in their career). It floats along (and fills your lungs) like a playful butterfly (3000) along some muddy water and each band member gets time to shine. “Iron Lung” sounds like a lost 1970s crime film soundtrack cut with Joey Walker‘s bass work, and then a krautrock jam when the guitar solo blasts through your speakers. “Gilese 710” tackles one of KGATLW’s favorite subjects – the environment (and what we’ve been doing to it for decades). It’s wild, slightly heavy, and seems to be all over the place while actually keeping within a tight structure. Imagine Captain Beefheart started a krautrock band and you’ll get the idea.

It’s an album that shouldn’t work (“Let’s just jam a lot based on a tempo, key, and title, and we’ll figure it out later.”), but it does quite well. The level of talent in KGATLW is baffling, they sell out shows all over the world, and yet so many people say, “Who?” when you mention them. I think they like it that way.

Keep your mind open.

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Bodywash release “Massif Central” from upcoming album, “I Held the Shape While I Could.”

Bodywash — the Montreal duo of Chris Steward and Rosie Long Decter — announces its new album,
I Held the Shape While I Could, out April 14th on Light Organ Records, and shares the lead single/video, “Massif Central.” Over I Held the Shape While I Could’s twelve tracks, Steward and Long Decter reflect on their separate and shared experiences of losing a sense of place, the way something once solid can slip between your fingers, and their attempts to build something new from the fallout. On lead single “Massif Central,” stark guitars and relentless drums accompany Steward’s whispered vocals as he recounts an experience of bureaucratic purgatory: a typo in a government letter caused Steward to lose his legal work status in Canada.

“After eight years living in Canada, in the Spring of 2021, a government clerical error caused me to lose my legal status here,” Steward explains. “As a UK national, I lost my right to work. My savings trickled away during months where I could do little but pace the corners of my apartment. I was prepared to pack my bags and leave as the life I’d hoped to construct for myself seemed to vanish into a bureaucratic abyss.”

“‘Massif’ is the sound of wailing into a cliff and not knowing if you’ll hear an echo,” continued Steward. “The spoken word is inspired by a squirrel that was trapped in the wall behind my bed, clawing its way to salvation. With the help of friends, family, music, and a few immigration lawyers (and the rest of my savings), I’m now a permanent resident here. But this song remains as testament to my experience with an exploitative institution.”

The accompanying video by Jordan Allen is a stunning collage of live footage, distorted visuals, and eerie graphics. “With ‘Massif Central,’ we wanted to encapsulate the panic and urgency that Chris experienced, and have the abstracts portray the anxiety and hopelessness one can feel at the hands of bureaucracy,” Allen adds. “I chose graphics that heavily leaned into feelings of being lost in a maze, with towering structures and horizon lines pulling you into them. The idea was that the camera would be both a CCTV view of the band, but also glitching to reveal the more emotionally internal visual aspects.”

Watch “Massif Central”
Steward and Long Decter met in college in 2014, but didn’t immediately share a musical language. Chris grew up in London listening to British dream pop and classic shoegaze; Rosie was raised in Toronto on folk and Canadiana. Working toward their own blend of airy vocals, intricate guitar work and atmospheric synths, they released their debut EP as Bodywash in 2016 and their first full-length, Comforter, in 2019.

As they prepared to release Comforter, Long Decter and Steward both experienced alienating shifts in their personal lives, leading to a mutual sense of dislocation. They began writing new material that was darker, more experimental, and at the same time more invigorating than the soothing dream pop on Comforter. In 2021 they took these songs into the studio, sharing them with longtime drummer RyanWhite and recording/mixing engineer Jace Lasek (Besnard Lakes). The resulting I Held the Shape While I Could is a record that lives in the sonics of decay and renewal: breaks that burst forth from a squall of fuzz guitars, drones that glitch and stutter like ice willing itself to thaw.

There are many places like home, and on I Held the Shape While I Could, home is a mutable thing; a location that is fixed until it isn’t. Across the record, Steward’s abstract guitars and Long Decter’s cascading vocals act as ambient throughlines, blurring the digital and organic, gesturing toward something intangible, just out of reach. Home is a process — the back and forth of guitar riffs and vocal hums, of files sent and received across the ocean. A world imagined and sculpted together.

Pre-order I Held the Shape While I Could

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Patrick at Pitch Perfect PR.]

shame show off their “Six-Pack” with their new single.

Today, shame — the UK-based quintet led by frontman Charlie Steen — unveil “Six-Pack,” the new single/video from Food for Worms, their new album out February 24th on Dead Oceans. Quickly becoming a fan favorite during the band’s recent live sets, “Six-Pack” is shame at their punchiest and most pulsating. Following lead single “Fingers Of Steel,” “Six-Pack” sees shame enter a new, surreal landscape, as reflected in Food for Worms’ cover artwork designed by acclaimed artist Marcel Dzama. It’s suggestive of what is left unsaid, what lies beneath the surface, the farcical and fantastical everyday that we are living in, a society where both everything and nothing is possible.

On “Six-Pack,” Steen adds: “‘Six-Pack’ is essentially the opposite of a Room 101; instead it’s a room where all your wildest desires can come true and will be showered upon you. Be it commodities, self-obsession, foods and B-lister celebrities, it’ll all be there if you want it to. You’ve done time behind bars and now you’re making time in-front of them. It’s time to make up for anything you’ve lost or wasted, it’s time to get it all.”

“Six-Pack” arrives alongside a video directed by Gilbert Bannerman and animated by Cyrus Hayley, featuring a warped reinvention of Napoleon befitting of New Year’s resolution season. Bannerman explains: “The idea was to make a parody of a middle aged bloke thinking he’s a king for going to the gym once. I read a lot about Napoleon and thought it would be a laugh to make it about him. The style comes from trying to make my youth spent playing PS1 not entirely wasted.”

WATCH SHAME’S “SIX-PACK” VIDEO

On one hand, shame’s new album Food for Worms calls to mind a certain morbidity, but on the other, it’s a celebration of life; the way that, in the end, we need each other. Food for Worms is an ode to friendship, and a documentation of the dynamic that only five people who have grown up together — and grown so close, against all odds — can share.

It’s through this, and defiance, that shame have continually moved forward together; finding light in uncomfortable contradictions and playing their vulnerabilities as strengths: the near breakdowns, identity crises, Steen routinely ripping his shirt off on-stage as a way of tackling his body weight insecurities. Everything is thrown into their live show, and the best shows of their lives are happening now.

Now they arrive, finally, at a place of hard-won maturity. Enter: Food for Worms, which Steen declares to be “the Lamborghini of shame records.”

WATCH SHAME’S “FINGERS OF STEEL” VIDEO

PRE-ORDER FOOD FOR WORMS

shame Tour Dates (New Dates in Bold)
Tue. Feb. 28 – Dublin, IE @ Button Factory
Wed. Mar. 1 – Dublin, IE @ Button Factory
Fri. Mar. 3 – Glasgow, UK @ SWG3
Sat. Mar. 4 – Newcastle, UK @ Boiler Shop
Sun. Mar. 5 – Leeds, UK @ Stylus
Tue. Mar. 7 – Sheffield, UK @ Leadmill
Wed. Mar. 8 – Liverpool, UK @ Invisible Wind Factory
Thu. Mar. 9 – Bristol, UK @ SWX
Sat. Mar. 11 – Manchester, UK @ New Century Hall
Sun. Mar. 12 – Cardiff, UK @ Tramshed
Tue. Mar. 14 – Nantes, FR @ Stereolux
Wed. Mar. 15 – Paris, FR @ Cabaret Sauvage
Thu. Mar. 16 – Bordeaux, FR @ Rock School Barbey
Sat. Mar. 18 – Lisbon, PT @ LAV
Sun. Mar. 19 – Madrid, ES @ Nazca
Mon. Mar. 20 – Barcelona, ES @ La 2 de Apolo
Wed. Mar. 22 – Nimes, FR @ Paloma
Thu. Mar. 23 – Milan, IT @ Magnolia
Fri. Mar. 24 – Zurich, CH @ Plaza
Sun. Mar. 26 – Munich, DE @ Technikum
Mon. Mar. 27 – Berlin, DE @ Astra
Tue. Mar. 28 – Hamburg, DE @ Markthalle
Thu. Mar. 30 – Oslo, NO @ Vulkan
Fri. Mar. 31 – Stockholm, SE @ Debaser
Sat. Apr. 1 – Copenhagen, DK @ VEGA
Tue. Apr. 4 – Cologne, DE @ Floria
Wed. Apr. 5 – Brussels, BE @ AB
Thu. Apr. 6 – Amsterdam, NL @ Melkweg
Fri. Apr. 28 – London, UK @ Brixton Academy
Sat. May 6 – Atlanta, GA @ Shaky Knees Festival
Sun. May 7 – Nashville, TN @ Basement East *
Tue. May 9 – Asheville, NC @ The Grey Eagle *
Wed. May 10 – Durham, NC @ Motorco Music Hall *
Fri. May 12 – Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar *
Sat. May 13 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer *
Sun. May 14 – Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw *
Tue. May 16 – Boston, MA @ The Sinclair *
Thu. May 18 – Montréal, QC @ Foufounes Électriques
Fri. May 19 – Ottawa, ON @ Club SAW
Sat. May 20 – Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace
Mon. May 22 – Kalamazoo, MI @ Bell’s Eccentric Cafe *
Wed. May 24 – Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall *
Fri. May 26 – St. Louis, MO @ Off Broadway *
Sat. May 27 – Lawrence, KS @ The Bottleneck *
Sun. May 28 – Fayetteville, AR @ George’s Majestic Lounge *
Tue. May 30 – Dallas,TX @ Granada Theater *
Fri. Jun. 2 – Austin, TX @ The Scoot Inn *
Sat. Jun. 3 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall *
Sun. Jun. 4 – New Orleans, LA @ Toulouse Theatre *

* w/ Been Stellar

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Jacob at Pitch Perfect PR.]

Rewind Review: Ram Dass & Kriece – Cosmix (2008)

What do you get when you mix lectures on Zen, the cosmos, the soul, the Tao, and the journey of the self with wicked bass and beats? If you’re lucky, you get something as cool as Cosmix by philosopher Ram Dass and Australian DJ Kriece.

The album has parts of Dass’ lectures under Kriece’s beats, and neither overwhelms the other. They perfectly blend to promote each other. “Mystic Poetry” has Dass talk about embracing cosmic love while Kriece puts down snappy, toe-tappy beats behind him. “Thousands of thoughts go by, like clouds in the sky,” Dass says on “Thoughts” – a great track about non-attachment to the things that keep us from experiencing the present.

“Mantra” is downright groovy, mixing Dass’ chants and Kriece’s dance beats in perfect unison. This will be stuck in your head for hours, and that’s a good thing. “Stuck” has Dass discussing how he moved away from psychotropic drugs and into deep meditation.

“Breath Inside the Breath” brings the beats to the forefront. “The soul is unique. It has its unique karma,” Dass tells us at the beginning of the beautiful “Dream Dance.” Kriece’s synths shimmer as Dass explains how the soul can liberate itself from attachments through various incarnations. It’s heavy stuff, but heavenly stuff.

“Do you hear that?” Dass asks as rain drops and thunder rolls ahead of Kriece’s synth beats. “That’s peace.” Dass asks us to find peace in the sounds (and silence) around us, and Kriece’s beats (and the spaces between them) nudge us toward it. On “Spacesuit for Earth,” Dass’ words of “When you take an incarnation, it’s like getting into a space suit…” begin the track and soon he’s talking about why we feel separate from each other, from the world around us, and the universe, and Kriece’s hypnotizing synths are soon taking us beyond that universe and Dass is telling us that we’ve been crammed into “a conceptual model since birth…From your point of view, it’s the only reality most of the time.”

“Desire” is both a lecture on the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and an ambient house track. The closer, “Additya Hridayam,” mixes what sounds like ambient crowd noise from a bus station with Dass’ echoing chants and mantras. It reminds us to slow down in the chaos of our daily lives, to step back from the rush to chasing a buck or get to the magical “golden goodie” (as Dass’ contemporary Alan Watts described it) that we think will make us happy.

It’s a neat album that mixes drum and bass and Zen, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy. What’s not to like?

Keep your mind open. This album will help in that regard.

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Rewind Review: Failure – In the Future Your Body Will Be the Furthest Thing from Your Mind (2018)

If Failure‘s 2015 album, The Heart Is a Monster, picked up where 1996’s Fantastic Planet left off, then their 2018 album, In the Future Your Body Will Be the Furthest Thing from Your Mind, doesn’t pick up where THIAM left off. It lifts off the ground and takes the band even further into the cosmos.

“Dark Speed” gets things off to a groovy start with Greg Edwards‘ funky bass line that will have you tapping your fingers on the steering wheel or your hot rod or your space cruiser. The bass gets heavier on “Paralytic Flow,” as do Ken Andrews‘ vocals about lust, desire, and passion. “Pennies” is one of those mellow tracks that Failure does so well: Simple, soft vocals, almost orchestral arrangements, and floating-in-space sound throughout the whole thing.

The album includes three “Segues” (numbers 10, 11, and 12), which begun with Fantastic Planet and have continued onto multiple albums since then. These tracks are all instrumentals either linking one song to the next or standing on their own as meditations. “Segue 10” is one of the meditative tracks, which clears your head before the somewhat menacing “No One Left.” Kellii Scott pounds out a lot of excess energy he had in the studio that day on it.

The drums and bass on “Solar Eyes” come to kick ass and take names. Andrews encourages us all to rest on “What Makes It Easy,” which is almost a soft love song. “Segue 11” sounds like it combines whale song with a thunderstorm. The slow build of “Found a Way” is like the sensation of watching an approaching comet. It’s a song about a break-up (“I finally found a way to release you and I don’t need anything you left me.””) wrapped in a power-rock track.

Scott’s drumming on “Distorted Fields” is wild and full of what almost sound like random drum fills, but then you realize he’s playing in advanced time signatures that will make your head spin. The groove of “Heavy and Blind” is wicked. “Another Post Human Dream” is a ballad for a prom at Phillip K. Dick High School. “Apocalypse Blooms” is the song you play in the car as you’re leaving that prom and heading for the make-out spot overlooking a neon-lit city with the knowledge it might be the last night of planet Earth.

“Come meet me in the silence,” Andrews sings on “Force Fed Rainbow” – a song great for leaving the comfort of a space station for the unknown, endless silence of space. “The Pineal Electorate” (with Edwards on lead vocals) reveals the band’s love of The Beatles‘ psychedelic era.

It’s another solid, cosmic entry in Failure‘s discography, and an album that will thinking of big-picture science and even bigger picture thoughts on humanity, technology, and the relationships between both.

Keep your mind open.

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Rewind Review: Failure – Tree of Stars (2014)

Taken from recordings of live shows from their reunion tour around 2014, Failure‘s Tree of Stars is a strong and tight capture of the band flattening crowds in Houston and Phoenix with their wall of cosmic shoegaze sound.

“Let It Drip” is the first track on the EP and the first one recorded in Phoenix. Ken Andrews distorted vocals go well with his roaring guitar, and Kellii Scott pretty much puts on a drumming clinic through the whole track. It’s over before you have time to catch your breath.

Greg Edwards‘ bass on “Frogs” (live from Houston) brings to mind a giant version of the titular creature rumbling under the surface of a dark pond upon which a meteor storm (Scott’s drumming) is reflected. The live version of “Sergeant Politeness” (the second Phoenix track) hits with aggressive thuds and extra vigor in Andrews’ vocals. The second track record in Houston is “Heliotropic,” which always has a roaring guitar solo from Andrews, and this version is no exception.

The download version of Tree of Stars comes with a new 2014 version of “Solaris” that is somehow even more deep-space than the original as a result of a slower beat, reverb-drenched vocals, and guitars that sound like they’re being played in Atlantis. The tour-only version had “Come Crashing” on it, which was Failure’s first new music since 1996’s Fantastic Planet and would end up on their 2015 album The Heart Is a Monster.

It’s a great tease of hopefully a full live album in the future.

Keep your mind open.

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Miss Grit releases “Lain (Phone Clone”) ahead of “Follow the Cyborg” album due February 24, 2023.

Miss Grit — the New York-based, Korean-American musician Margaret Sohn (they/she) — presents “Lain (Phone Clone),” the new single/video from their forthcoming self-produced debut album, Follow the Cyborg, out February 24th on Mute. On “Lain (Phone Clone),” Sohn balances vast pop elements, cinematic atmospherics and textures with blasts of squealing guitar. Inspired by Serial Experiments Lain, Yasuyuki Ueda’s anime about a girl whose online self attempts to drag her physical self away from reality, “Lain (Phone Clone)” presents a chilling moment when Sohn sings,“I don’t want to see everything anymore.” They comment, “I feel like the divide between my inner and outer self can grow so big sometimes that it feels like I’m being eclipsed by this big cringey monster. I wanted to write this to mock the monster and remind myself I’m not powerless against it.”

Watch Miss Grit’s “Lain (Phone Clone)” Video

Across Follow the Cyborg, Miss Grit pursues the path of a non-human machine, as it moves from its helpless origin to awareness and liberation. At times gentle and sparse, at others volatile and explosive, Follow the Cyborg occupies a sonic world of electronic experimentation and stirring electric guitars. It was recorded mostly in solitude in Sohn’s home studio, with the exception of a few guest collaborators joining: Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint, Aron Kobayashi Ritch of Momma, and Pearla.

Miss Grit’s impetus to conceive an album about the life of a cyborg stems from their own connection to this way of existing. As a mixed-race, non-binary artist, Sohn has always rejected the limits of identity thrust upon them by the outside world, instead favoring an embrace of a more fluid and complex understanding of the self. Hailed by Rolling Stone as an “inventive, incisive singer-songwriter,” their process is introspective, their vision precise. In Follow the Cyborg, Sohn subtly and overtly refer to films, including Her, Ex Machina, and Ghost in the Shell, plus essays by Jia Tolentino (from Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion) and Donna Horroway’s A Cyborg Manifesto.

“Lain (Phone Clone)” follows the “beguiling and elastic” (Stereogum) single “Like You,” with its precise, slowly building electric guitars and bold basslines performed by Zoltan Sindhu, as well as the title-track “Follow the Cyborg,” praised by Pitchfork for its “adrenaline high” and “electronic dissonance.”

Watch the “Follow the Cyborg” Video

Watch the “Like You” Lyric Video

Pre-order Follow the Cyborg

Miss Grit will perform a pair of album release shows in New York and Los Angeles, with more dates to follow. Tickets are on sale now.

Miss Grit Tour Dates
Wed. Feb. 22 – New York, NY @ Baby’s All Right
Fri. Feb. 24 – Los Angeles, CA @ Moroccan Lounge

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Jessica at Pitch Perfect PR.]

Rewind Review: King Buffalo – The Burden of Restlessness (2021)

It’s a bit surprising that I didn’t own a copy of King Buffalo‘s The Burden of Restlessness until now, because they were touring with this album when I first saw them live (playing with Clutch and Stöner) in 2021. I was blown away by their performance and became an immediate fan. I instead bought their first album (and a shirt) at their merchandise table, and this album has somehow eluded me until now.

It’s a shame, because the opening track, “Burning,” alone is a massive slice of cosmic rock that hits as hard as any All Them Witches track but in more of a “Silver Surfer zipping past a collapsing dwarf star” feel than an occult-psychedelic feel. Dan Reynolds bass on “Hebetation” will pick you up, rattle you, and inspire Herculean strength in you for whatever task you’re doing at that moment. The breakdown around the two-minute mark is sublime. Sean McVay sings about contemplating his mortality, but he never sounds frightened by it. He’s too busy shredding his guitar to worry about what comes after death.

McVay’s guitar ripples across “Locusts” like the titular insects bouncing across a wheat field. “Silverfish” is a stand-out on the album with McVay’s guitar sounding like a space probe, Scott Donaldson‘s precision drumming mixed with thunderous fills now and then, and Reynolds bass moving like a cat around the room waiting to either curl up on your lap or attack your ankle. It chooses the latter.

McVay cranks the fuzz on “Grifter,” which might flatten you if you’re not prepared for it. McVay explores depression on “The Knocks” (“Every day I wake up on the floor. Another useless day like every one that’s come before.”). It’s a slow burn to a powerful explosion of sound, like McVay has finally decided to kick open his barricaded door from the inside and woe betide anyone who’s on the other side. “Loam” closes the album with over seven minutes of head-trip rock with McVay says he’s “shedding the burden of restlessness to rise from the loam of the nothingness.” You’ll always get a thumbs-up from me if you close your album with a Zen lesson.

Keep your mind open (This album will help.).

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