Cruciamentum

Obsidian Refractions

Profound Lore

Eight years following their debut album Charnel Passages—which was one of the most anticipated death metal debuts of current canon—US-via-UK abyssic death metal contingent Cruciamentum have finally emerged with their sophomore album Obsidian Refractions. Now more commanding than ever with a formidable new lineup, Obsidian Refractions sees Cruciamentum deliver their most advanced, demanding and overpowering work yet. Taking everything in the band’s death metal paradigm to the next sonic measure beyond anything the band have previously released, this latest release combines the very essence and aesthetic of ancient cult death metal while encapsulating the dynamic, complex, next-level affectations relevant in today’s death metal landscape. The darkness and resonating unequivocal, uncompromising evil and magnitude surrounding Obsidian Refractions also builds upon the band’s aura of dark death metal majesty, combined with the progressive, savage and complex-yet-aggressive substance of the album through the unrelenting and ever tectonic-shifting riff assault. Witness a modern death metal monument unparalleled.

Left Cross

Upon Desecrated Altars

Profound Lore

Emerging in 2015 with a uniquely hostile brand of war charged death metal, Virginia’s Left Cross quickly established themselves as a merciless live act seemingly incapable of restraint. Forging and refining their sound over several releases, the band continued their relentless assault while losing none of their murderous intent. Now veterans of countless campaigns, they return to unleash their sophomore effort, Upon Desecrated Altars, under the banner of Profound Lore Records. A cacophonous offering, Upon Desecrated Altars joins grotesque melodies with an inhuman vehemence that forgoes any ambiguity. Little to no respite can be found as each track builds upon the devastation of the last, ultimately rising to a crescendo of conquest. With a salvo of blistering solos, thunderous percussion and infernal commands, Left Cross declares victory and marches onward.

King Louie Bankston

Harahan Fats

Goner

Goner Records is honored to release Harahan Fats, an extraordinary posthumous album by King Louie Bankston (December 18, 1972 - February 12, 2022). The collection showcases an American artist at the pinnacle of his musical and personal identity. An aural roadmap to South Louisiana that’s imbued with personal mythologies and blurry, beer-soaked and drug-skewed memories, Harahan Fats was recorded over a four-year period that culminated in mid-October 2021. As co-founder and drummer of the Royal Pendletons, Bankston recorded with power-pop legend Alex Chilton. He picked up a Gibson Flying V for his work in Bad Times, a garage rock supergroup that Bankston helmed alongside Eric Oblivian and Jay Reatard. In the 1990s, Bankston channeled his energy into bands like the Persuaders, Intelligenitals, the Clickems, Harahan Crack Combo, and Gerry And The Bastard Makers. At the dawn of the new century, he founded the legendary King Louie One Man Band. In 2000, Louie pulled up stakes in New Orleans and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he joined the power-pop punk band The Exploding Hearts. Bankston wrote many of the songs and played keyboards on their only album, the highly acclaimed Guitar Romantic, released mere weeks before three members of the band were killed in a van wreck, and recently reissued by Third Man Records. Bankston then landed in Memphis, where he formed the Loose Diamonds, a ramshackle bar band, with Jack Oblivian, Harlan T. Bobo, and Gary Wrong. With guitarist Julian Fried, he formed Missing Monuments and Black Rose Band,...

Citric Dummies

Zen And The Arcade Of Beating Your Ass

Feel It

***"Bursting out of a burning trash heap like some mutated, blitzed skeleton in a leatherjacket, Citric Dummies thrash their listeners with a heavy dose of pulverizing punk madness on their latest LP Zen and The Arcade of Beating Your Ass. The Minneapolis based trio have previously released a handful of endlessly infectious records on US and Euro labels like Erste Theke Tonträger, Fashionable Idiots, and Another Label- luring in unsuspecting punks with their aberrant, tuneful noise. Citric Dummies rip turbocharged, catchy songs riddled with big hooks that are inhaled like paint fumes by fans of niche KBD gems and classics like The Ramones and The Misfits. The band has signed with Feel It Records to release their most dialed and corrosive record to date- a pièce de résistance for LSD enthusiasts and jabronis alike. Produced by Erik Nervous (known for his own project as well as production work with The Spits and Liquids), Zen and The Arcade of Beating Your Ass Is a masterclass in unpretentious and unrelenting party punk. The cover is a clever mockery of Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade waving a friendly middle-finger paying homage to the punk heroes of yore. Citric Dummies power through 14 songs in 23 minutes in a psychotic frenzy. The songs conjure chaotic and hilarious glimpses into the everyday life of a hesher self-deprecating, taking copious amounts of illicit substances, and kicking the teeth out of the phonies that step in their way. Sonically, Citric Dummies have honed their knuckle-dragging craft, and sound...

Wayfarer

American Gothic

Profound Lore

Wayfarer is the pre-eminent Western American metal band. Comprised of four black clad players from Denver, Colorado, the band’s sound draws from the deep wells of black metal, gothic country, and Americana, creating a thunderous and uniquely American genre of metal all to their own. After ten years of existence, the band presents American Gothic —a defining statement of Western heavy music that explores the dark soul of the nation itself. This time working alongside accomplished producer Arthur Rizk (Kreator, Soulfy) the band brings an aggressive and expansive vision to life in a new full length album. Led by powerful riffing, bleak melodic sensibilities, and pointed songwriting, this record serves as a funeral for the American dream. Caked in dust, and buried deep in blood and gunpowder, it paints a brutal and beautiful portrait, and sees Wayfarer elevate their unique and genuine brand of metal to new heights.

Ragana

Desolation's Flower

Flenser

Ragana is a duo whose members alternate duties on drums, guitar, and vocals to produce some of the most unique and affecting dark music in metal today. The two-piece came together in 2011 in the DIY punk scene of Olympia, WA and are now based in Olympia and Oakland, CA. In their time together so far, Ragana have self-released five albums and teamed up with genre-favourite Thou for a split release in 2018. The following year, Ragana released their heralded We Know That The Heavens Are Empty EP and have quietly been working on new music ever since. The band signed with The Flenser in late 2022 and now present their forthcoming debut album for the label, Desolation’s Flower. On Desolation’s Flower, Ragana draws upon a number of influences from the flora and fauna of their Pacific Northwest origins to the darkly nostalgic folk of Mt. Eerie and, yes, their Olympian forebears Wolves In The Throne Room, synthesising them into an experimental, highly idiosyncratic take on black metal. Held together by an intense focus on raw emotion and haunting atmospherics, Ragana shifts seamlessly from tender, mesmerising vocal harmonies to piercing, heart-ripping screams and back again, yielding music that is heavy, beautiful and punishing all at once. Written over the past few tumultuous years, Desolation’s Flower is the band’s most devastating effort to date, containing seven incantations of loss, rage, pain and hope. Expertly engineered by the masterful Nicholas Wilbur at the Unknown Studio in Anacortes, Washington (Planning For Burial, drowse,...

Spllit

Infinite Hatch

Feel It

Cut from a magnetic, jagged edge of the Louisiana underground, Spllit open up an entirely new can of worms on 'Infinite Hatch'. A dozen new originals, mined from the minds of Marance and Urq, prove to be quite the follow-up to their introductory 2021 effort, 'Spllit Sides'. Transitioning from home recording project to roadworthy live unit - anchored by Raegan Labat (bass) and Ryan Welsh (drums) has worked wonders for Spllit's style. Their approach to composition remains wonderfully fried - a galaxy of textured sonic synapses, totally wired and deeply imaginative. Yet, in the midst of this collision of sounds, there's beauty. Anxieties transcend into swirling dual-vocal pop art experimentalia, while guitar work taps into something Magical. Spllit's old friend MIDI again contributes to the smokestack of layered tracks, though somehow - IT ALL MAKES SENSE. Crystalline soundscapes from humid human minds. 'Infinite Hatch' is a rare flavor, strikingly different based on how you approach it, yet cohesive. Spllit are triumphant sonic chemists, cooking in the avant-lab that's way, way out there.

Gravesend

Gowanus Death Stomp

20 Buck Spin

The dark, seedy underworld of New York City once again emerges as the cityscape is tainted by sewage, crack smoke and the trade of flesh. The streets, once bustling with life, permeate with the grotesque and filth-ridden chaos of yesteryear. Among these harsh realities, within the walls of the dimly lit alley ways, a stench reeks of bodily fluids and rat feces. On the subway platforms, desperate souls engage in random acts of violence on one another over a few measly bucks. The East River runs a sickly green and the city’s hue mirrors the shadows cast by these illicit endeavors. Amid this unsettling somber reality a soundscape to capture the horror is now realized in the form of Gravesend’s second album. The new album Gowanus Death Stomp compounds the cruelty displayed on 2021 debut Methods Of Human Disposal into an ever more gritty and primal barrage of violence. At the crossroads of criminal depravity and urban malaise, Gravesend utilize many tools of the trade. Black / death / grind / war metal all meld seamlessly into a tar pit of scathing back-alley sadism and acid-tongued vocals. Like a newly found corpse down by the docks, the smell of decomposition is wafting out of every track on Gowanus Death Stomp. And as with NYC’s underground legends from Cro-Mags to Swans to Type O Negative, Gravesend embodies the pulse of the city, even as that pulse bleeds out on the concrete.

Alien Nosejob

The Derivative Sounds Of

Goner

Less than twelve months on from the triumphant rock ’n’ roll record that was Stained Glass, Australia’s most tasteful sonic culinary artiste Jake Robertson serves up The Derivative Sounds Of, another platter in his never-ending, ever-extending Alien Nosejob banquet. Since initially firing out similar flavors on his first offering, Alien Nosejob has conquered the challenges of disco, hardcore, new wave, rock and roll (all drowned in his characteristically sweet sense of humor) before finally returning back to his musical roots: the jangly, adolescent feel of 1960s garage. After one of Robertson’s first bands, The Frowning Clouds, reunited for a few shows in September 2022, he found himself digging up old songs and riffs from the period, some spanning back to as early as 2006 and up until around 2012. This record features many of those song ideas—some reworked, some rewritten, some exactly the same. All together now as one hot package. Leaning into his musical tastes from the Clouds’ period of existence, Robertson digs up inspiration in some teenage staples: The Troggs, Mike Furber, the under-appreciated bands that make up the Shutdown ’66 / Back From The Grave compilations, without overdoing the sugar, salt, MSG, whatever one wants to call it. This record was recorded by Robertson all by his lonesome over a weekend in his garage. There’s no paisley shirts, no skinny-ties, no winkle-pickers, no slim-fit suits and no haircuts—just Robertson and his 1964 MacBook Pro. Garage rock revival is a sound that’s often overdone,...

Kid Congo Powers

Sings The Subsonics

In The Red

Kid Congo Powers has seen fit to cover two songs by Atlanta garage rock legends the Subsonics and release them on seven inch vinyl—the way God intended rock 'n' roll to be heard. Kid’s scuzzy, noisy renditions do the originals proud and are guaranteed to make one want to get up, dance and behave badly. Housed in a gaudy full color sleeve and pressed on kaleidoscopic tricolor vinyl.

Fearing

Destroyer

Profound Lore

California post-punk outfit Fearing follow their 2020 debut album Shadow with Destroyer, which sees the core trio continuing to foster their sound by migrating towards sonic realms that capture the somber, the austere, the vigorous, and the vibrant. It is a striking singular vision of abyssal maritime desolation, expressed by carving sonic territory that seamlessly blends French coldwave, European post-punk, and first wave shoegaze. Ever since their debut EP A Life Of None (2017), followed by their widely celebrated Black Sand EP (2018), Fearing have been procuring a constant flow of commendable releases. Through vigorous touring and live endeavors that include the likes of Gatecreeper, She Wants Revenge, Soft Kill, 200 Stab Wounds, Choir Boy, Narrow Head, Death Bells, along with notable festivals as Substance, Home Sick, and Out From The Shadows, they have fastened themselves as one of the apex artists in today’s post-punk current.

Carlton Melton

Turn To Earth

Agitated

Northern California psychedelic sorcerers Carlton Melton are brain surfers, mind trippers—“psychlists,” if you prefer. The band will take your head for a ride, occasionally rushing at superluminal speeds through a wormhole or gliding softly on a gentle breeze in a leafy glade. Sometimes your brain needs to rage, and sometimes it needs to repose. For a decade and a half, the band has yo-yo’ed, almost schizophrenically, between these two modes: walloping space jams with furious guitar solos in one hemisphere of the brain and ethereal, feather-light splashdowns in the other. Not to mention a track here and there that builds from the latter into the former. But with two new releases in 2023, the band has evolved. Whether psych rock or ambient trance, their sound remains driving, organic, and flowing. With the addition of Anthony Taibi (White Manna, DDT), however, the group’s metal freak-outs are Hawkwindier and their droning kraut trances are Spacemen 3-er. In January, the quartet released the playfully spacey Resemble Ensemble, recorded in Taibi’s home studio 3D Light. October now sees the band Turn To Earth, a work with scents of Autumn, a season of death and transition. The cover art evokes a vine-covered, electric crucifix. The sound is, well, earthy but also gritty and striving towards change. The album was recorded in Fall 2022 and now harvested in Fall 2023. Phil Becker (Terry Gross, Pins Of Light) contributed drums and percussion to a few tracks on Turn To Earth, recording the album at El Studio in...

Todd, Pat & The Rankoutsiders

Sons Of The City Ditch

Dog Meat Records

A resurgent Dog Meat Records is thrilled and proud to release a new album by a resurgent rock'n'roller and an old friend, Pat Todd and his band Tje Rankoutsiders. The seventh album by LA's finest rock'n'roll band comes some 36 years after the label's first dalliances with Pat, back when he fronted the legendary Lazy Cowgirls. The new album shows that Pat has lost none of his spark, that his voice and songwriting have only gotten stronger, and that he's got another killer band behind him, one that mixes classic '70s punk rock roots with country, blues and rock'n'roll in a manner that sits somewhere between Exile on Main Street and LAMF. The new album is highlighted as usual by Pat Todd's fantastic songs. A prolific writer with an eye on life in the margins—whether they be in small towns or the big sprawling city he has called home for 40 years—Todd routinely hits the mark where youth and the advancement of age find common ground in alienation and wilfulness. Pat knows that rock’n’roll is not necessarily a young person's game, and nor is it a glamourous one; the name he gave this band accurately points to where he and they are coming from. New originals like 'All We Have To Show', the horn-riffing rocker 'Living In A World of Hurt' and the raucous country-folk punker 'Goodbye to the World' are up there with anything he has ever written, and the Rankoutsiders play them even better than ever. Indeed, a...

False Fed

Let Them Eat Fake

Neurot Recordings

From the dark roots of Amebix, Discharge and Nausea. A new twisted branch of thorns shoots from the alternate family tree. In 2019 BC (Before Covid) Discharge frontman Jeff Janiak reached out to longtime friend and musician JP Parsons to assist on a new project. The pair wrote and recorded various ideas before reaching out to Amebix guitarist Stig.C.Miller who joined them in the midst of the global pandemic. The trio utilized this new creative climate of physical restriction and went on to set the foundations for their first album, via file sharing home recordings, which would be arranged and produced by Stig. It was several months later when he would call upon Nausea, Ministry and former Amebix drummer Roy Mayorga to complete the line up. Roy went onto record drums, mix and produce the band's debut album 'LET THEM EAT FAKE'. In these unprecedented times of global restriction, fear and the everlasting lack of faith in the hierarchy 'False Fed' has cultivated a heavy sound that is drenched in melody, aggression and shrouded in darkness. It is not bound by genre, yet still offers subtle hints to the creators lineage.

Krieg

Ruiner

Profound Lore

Ruiner is the first full-length from the cult US black metal force Krieg since 2014’s Transient and is a despondent expression that captures the classic complexion that has solidified the band as a vanguard and pioneer of the genre. Even though Ruiner is the first Krieg full-length album in nine years, they have continued to remain active leading up to its long-awaited release through various splits, collaborations and EPs. Those have all culminated in this ultimate manifestion. Ruiner is unrepentant and remorseless black metal in the reflective manner Krieg mastermind N. Jameson has always been known for. It harnesses the notable savagery and unhinged aura present in their triarchy of classic works, Destruction Ritual (2001), The Black House (2004), and Blue Miasma (2006), while maintaining a harsh, sorrowful and cold-blooded melancholic aura.

Catatonic Suns

s/t

Agitated

Brand new album from young Allentown, PA three-piece Catatonic Suns. Their first for Agitated Records. Catatonic Suns comprises eight songs (seven originals, and an Original Sins cover) and has blown Agitated's collective minds. Their previous album was an incredible melding of big-sounding US/UK underground sounds, but this album has taken that fire further. The band have developed more of a hi-fidelity psychedelic rock with a shoegazery shimmer akin to the late '80s / early '90s Pacific Northwest sound in cahoots with the UK sound of early '90s Creation / 4AD. For fans of Screaming Trees, Nirvana, The Verve (early), Slowdive, Ride, Alice In Chains. Songs that soar, these new recordings verge on the epic.

Upchuck

Bite The Hand That Feeds

Famous Class

***Channeling the speed of youth and the heaviness of a fleshy, lived life in equal proportion, Upchuck’s second LP, Bite the Hand That Feeds, is a Trojan Horse par excellence, craftily smuggling in waves of sentimental emotion and clever pop songwriting under a veil of pulsing rhythms and scorching riffs. What binds Upchuck together is a purity of intention, an organic loyalty to a thick knot of uncalculated friendships, struggles, and desires. These are songs about the joy of continuing to live, songs that find each other in the rush of a crushing reality, propelling the listener onward towards a collective release, however brief it may last. Themes of surviving through the night, youth-blinded love, cheap champagne soaked back-alley parties, and chaotic street protests are subsumed under a single unifying thread: the needs we have for one another, our shared hunger for connection. In a world saturated with arbitrary rules and paper-thin moralism, Upchuck offer freedom through sensation, a type of unserious transcendence found through the swirl of bodies melting into one another in the passion of dance. With Bite the Hand That Feeds, Upchuck isn’t trying to tell anyone how to live. Rather, they are simply trying to find a way to make life more worth living for both themselves and their friends—if the music compels you to move, you might as well consider yourself their friend too. Shortly after the release of their debut album Sense Yourself, Upchuck absconded to Southern California to record Bite the Hand That...

Faith Healer

The Hand That Fits The Glove

Mint

Faith Healer quietly crystallizes on their new album The Hand That Fits The Glove, reshaping their already approachable pop sound into something even more immediate and invigorating. With their 2017 album Try ;-), the duo of Jessica Jalbert and producer/multi-instrumentalist Renny Wilson began stripping away some of the ‘60s chamber pop influences that had informed the earliest Faith Healer material, and these eight new songs continue expanding outward in new directions. It’s a multicolored assortment of richly detailed songwriting that feels surprisingly straightforward, knowingly concealing its complexities always just beneath a sheen of composed cool. The evolution that brought Faith Healer to this point has been ongoing since the project’s earliest days. Jalbert and Wilson had been working together since the time when Jalbert was still performing under her own name in the early 2010’s, transitioning to the Faith Healer moniker on 2015 album Cosmic Troubles and their creative partnership truly solidifying with Try ;-). Those albums were built from the ground up with an insular design, with sole contributors Jalbert and Wilson adding overdubs and sculpting the sound. The core Faith Healer duo expands their membership for the first time on The Hand That Fits The Glove, inviting additional musicians into the picture and filling out the sound with a live band feel. Players from various intersections of Canada’s indie circles played on the album, including contributions from longtime Faith Healer collaborators like Jenni Roberts (who’s also done some time as a touring musician on runs with TOPS...

Hillburg, Anna

Tired Girls

Speakeasy Studios SF

Tired Girls is the third full-length studio album by Bay Area singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Anna Hillburg. Co-produced and recorded with Jason Quever of the Papercuts, the pair created an album for lovers of finely crafted and supremely catchy chamber pop. As always, Hillburg’s voice takes center stage, but for Tired Girls she made a conscious choice to dig deeper into her trumpet skills and make more elaborate horn arrangements than her previous records. Lyrically, Hillburg dives into what it is to be a contemporary woman, and how one perseveres, finds inspiration, creates, loves, and lives. Recorded throughout 2022 at Quever’s studio, the two built dreamy soundscapes with long-time collaborators Logan Kroeber on drums (The Dodos), Josh Miller on bass (Chime School, Extra Classic), and Yea Ming Chen on keys. The entire record has a real “Ladies, trust your gut” feeling, unsurprisingly, as Hillburg says she tends to write songs about “the reality of womanhood and feminism but ya know, why not make that a little ‘dancey’?” As a collection, Tired Girls marks her arrival as an artist who has hit their stride. Each track shows her talent and progression as a songwriter and performer. As a multi-instrumentalist and classically trained trumpet player, Hillburg is a sought-after session and live musician in the vibrant Bay Area music scene, performing regularly with Shannon And The Clams, The Dodos, The Moore Brothers, The Once And Future Band, Will Sprott, Dream Date, Greg Ashley, Shannon Shaw and her All-Star Buddy Band, and...

Robb, Emily

If I Am Misery Then Give Me Affection

Petty Bunco

The fantastic new album from tireless seeker Emily Robb. It’s a no-frills, high-minded celebration of guitar and sound and tone and string and amp and adventure committed to tape at Emily’s own Suddenly Studio in Philadelphia in fits and spurts stretching over 2022/23. These are economical tunes of utter trance and tightrope pulsations, with a fearless spirit and a devotion to energy and personality that digs into previously untapped mines. With zero fuss and pomp, If I Am Misery Then Give Me Affection builds a wholly new palette of expression, and Emily follows her Les Paul like it’s a divining rod. It’s anyone’s guess where it points next, but we’re all fortunate enough to be invited along for the ride.

Dwyer, John + Heather Lockie, Thomas Dolas, Kyp Malone, Andres Renteria, Brad Caulkins & Archie Carey

RITUAL / HABIT / CEREMONY

Castle Face

The band is John Dwyer (synths, vocals), Heather Lockie (viola), Thomas Dolas (synths), Andres Renteria (hand percussion), Brad Caulkins (tenor saxophone), Kyp Malone (synths) and Archie Carey (bassoon). The singers are YoshimiO (Boredoms, OOIOO), Albert Wolski (EXEK), Gracie Jackson (GracieHorse), Ciriza (Artist Extraordinaire), Kyp Malone (Bent Arcana, TV On The Radio, Rain Machine etc.), Brigid Dawson (Thee Oh Sees, The Mothers Network), AZITA (Scissor Girls, Bride of NONO, AZITA) For fans of Steve Roach, Eno, Syrinx, Howard Shore, Current 93, Terry Riley, Tangerine Dream and a proper sage scrub. “An experiment in symphonic improvisation paired with synthesizer-scapes. Strings, reeds, synths and hand percussion all blend sweetly into an odd landscape indeed. The final touch was to bring aboard some singers I have loved over the years. I’m so pleased they were all willing to participate and I’m very tickled by the plane we navigate. Once YoshimiO agreed to be on board I knew we were going to be OK. Recorded and mixed at my home studio (Stu-Stu-Studio in Los Angeles) and remotely, this one was a slow burn to see the light of day. And here it is in its final crystal form. Celebrating the spaces between ritual, habit and ceremony. And all the parallels between. The line is blurred. This is occult adjacent strain of sound. At home in daily ritual, contemplation and meditation.” —John Dwyer

Arkbro, Ellen

Sounds While Waiting

W.25TH

Sounds While Waiting documents the latest organ works by composer and musician Ellen Arkbro – following her phenomenal debut, 2017's For Organ And Brass, and the more recent CHORDS for organ. Recorded at a centuries-old church in Unnaryd, Sweden in June 2020, these pieces reveal the enchanting qualities of sustained harmonic sound, how patterns of listening dissolve and emerge as textured space. On opening track "Changes," long radiant tones ebb and flow like divine breaths, while "Leaving Dreaming" builds with dynamic tension to unlock a subtle, otherworldly ambience. As the composer states in the sleeve notes, "These recordings are traces of something I have come to love to do in large resonant spaces, which is to set up sustained chords on multiple organs and then move slowly through the sound. The instruments are usually far apart, which makes for the emergence of large fields of continuous change, spaces of harmonicity that can be passed through layer by layer and which contain within them points of both clarity and overwhelming complexity. The organ pipes are tuned and retuned, though sometimes I leave them just as they are. What I'm searching for is the moment when a particular kind of sounding texturality is revealed – it is rough, focused and yet strangely transparent." Arkbro composes for acoustic instruments, for synthetic sound and for combinations of both, including music for orchestra and smaller chamber ensembles and large scale installation works. She currently performs in Catherine Christer Hennix's Kamigaku ensemble and has previously...

Tomb Mold

The Enduring Spirit

20 Buck Spin

***ON LIMITED EXCLUSIVE REVOLVER ONLY BABY BLUE / BLACK GALAXY VINYL!!! After releasing three albums in three years and then spending the next four in the wilderness, Tomb Mold has been reborn on fourth album The Enduring Spirit, a thoroughly unabashed step into vast new territories. Yet for all its frenetic daring and audacious exploration, it is never anything other than unmistakably Tomb Mold. While the expanding Tomb Mold architecture could be heard on last year’s self-released Aperture Of Body tape, it comes into clear focus throughout The Enduring Spirit. Certainly Derrick Vella’s time creating within and expanding the doom genre in Dream Unending has seeped into the flesh of Tomb Mold, not to mention Payson Power and Max Klebanoff’s explorations in their own Daydream Plus project. With album opener “The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)” the band’s angular dimension shifting riffing appears right out of the gate as the track travels through varying degrees of progressive death metal and some of the band’s most extreme material yet. “Will Of Whispers” enters with a jazz-like fantasy sequence before careening into a blinding white light barrage, tasteful guitar leads and back to a dreamy serpentine pattern, encompassing whole universes in its nearly seven minute run-time. The back half of the record continues the voyage into what’s possible with the outward expansion of death metal norms, reaching the zenith of eleven plus minute album closer “The Enduring Spirit Of Calamity,” an otherworldly journey into a vortex where all things converge...

Dark Dark Dark / Nona Marie Invie

Something Was There

Dark Dark Dark

Dark Dark Dark’s rich history is punctuated by house shows and train hopping, touring as support for The National in Portugal, playing both The National and TV On The Radio’s ATP Festivals, and years of indefatigable coast-to-coast U.S. touring. It’s a history rich with recordings, including a pair of celebrated full-lengths produced by Tom Herbers (Low, The Cactus Blossoms), three EPs, and a feature film score. Now, ten years later—surprise—a new 10-inch single. In 2013, when Dark Dark Dark released the What I Needed EP, anyone might have guessed it was a bridge between the previous year’s lauded album Who Needs Who and the next big venture. The band had closed out 2012 as part of Australia's touring Harvest Festival, during which they stepped up to fill an unexpectedly vacant slot much later in the day, enchanting thousands of unsuspecting festival-goers. Alas, after that, the band went silent. The release of these new songs is certainly delightful and perhaps startling, as is the promise of more solo work from singer Nona Marie Invie. On the gorgeous and stately “Didn’t I Try,” Invie’s voice is elegant as ever, couched in the familiar sounds of Marshall LaCount’s distorted banjo and Mark Trecka’s roiling drums. The loping and haunted “Something Was There” follows—a staple of Dark Dark Dark’s live sets in the last year of their touring. Fans of contemporaries Weyes Blood (of which DDD multi-instrumentalist Walt McClements is now a full-time member) and Angel Olsen (in whose live and studio band...

The Exbats

Song Machine

Goner

In a just world, Song Machine, the fifth full-length album from The Exbats, which arrives via Goner Records, would become one of the most-loved and most-listened to albums of the 2020s. With the thirteen-track album, the Bisbee, Arizona-based band further their analog back-to-the-future combination of the Shangri-Las and pre-Velvet Underground doo-wop wannabe Lou Reed, churning out catchy tunes laden with buoyant choruses that rank alongside the best A-sides recorded in the shadow of the Brill Building or with the Wrecking Crew in tow. The Exbats are effortless time travelers—this time, they’ve set the dial for the early 1970s, incorporating the sonic magic of The Partridge Family, Muswell Hillbillies-era Kinks, and Brian Wilson into the crux of their musical ethos, evident on tracks like the propulsive “Riding With Paul” and “The Happy Castaway,” which bookend the album. “What I remember about that era is going to record stores and seeing a wall of 45s that somebody was tasked with moving around [in concordance with] the Billboard charts,” says Kenny McLain, who, alongside daughter Inez, is the driving force behind The Exbats. “With our band we’re kinda moving things around on that towering wall of singles, as if it were from some sort of ancient tomb, and we’re trying to crack a code and make it to number one. So, I suppose, some magic door will open. And we’ll all be free? Or something like that.” Inez McLain, namesake of the Monkees’ wool-capped guitarist Mike Nesmith, has played drums and sung for...

Cuticles

Major Works

Siltbreeze

Oamaru, located about 80 miles north of Dunedin on New Zealand's south island, might seem like the last place you expect to find a prodigious racket like Cuticles, but ain't that a kick? You just never know. Formed around the nucleus of Austen McMillian, Matthew Plunkett (ex-Trendees) & Lisa Preston (Nux Vomica, The Portage) a couple years back, they've been stacking up the hits and on Major Works, it's time to cash in. There's 18 tracks here and Cuticles chew through 'em with abandon. Someone just yelled out from the attic next door, "Sounds like the Pastels, with guns!" One could make a case for the South Island Sound coursing through their veins (they do live there after all), but the sheer abandon-pop that gushes off the grooves, it's hard not to be reminded of those two, great, David Mitchell helmed Auckland outfits, The Exploding Budgies & Goblin Mix. They might all drink the same water, who knows? But it sure feels good to get brain-stung again by the salty rimes off the Otago Coast. Long may they howl.

Undergang

De Syv Stadier Af Ford​æ​rv

Dark Descent

Undergang’s signature mix of neanderthalic drumming and stringy, phlegm-like riffs is instantly recognizable to any death metal fan. Equally so is David Torturdød’s signature vomit-snarled vocals, all of which immediately will grip one with the fist of festering decay. Although primal and disgusting as ever, the band has always had a penchant for including gloomy moments betwixt their rot-churning disdain. De Syv Stadier Af Ford​æ​rv has plenty of those disgusting dynamics, which throw a superb stench into the air with remorseless instrumental fury and equally unsavory vocals, taking everything that made the death metal of old great and plunging it furiously into the carcass of today like a rusted knife designed to open seeping sores and spray pus forth upon all within the vicinity. The pulverizing putrescence does not relent… From the slowest drudges to the grinding fury and all sonic sadism in between, Undergang’s newest offering is a viciously unpleasant and a transfixing opus of odors most foul. Woefully brutal, most puny headbangers will simply die from the sheer weight of this thing if they try to lift it onto their turntable. Any remaining will be flattened by the brutal gut-opening notes and will be subjected to twenty minutes thereafter. Although all of the band’s albums contain nothing short of true magnificent monstrosities from start to end, the amount of diversity in this miniature tome of auditory violations is impeccable even by the band’s high standard. If one finds themselves presented with this cacophony of rot, then be sure...

Acid Twilight

Shadow Wrangler

Not Not Fun

Argentine modal master Acid Twilight’s third raga saga maps a dusty plain of tumbleweeds, circling vultures, and bleached bones, across which rides a nameless stranger: Shadow Wrangler. Inspired by visions of high noon dread and the textures of psychedelic twang, they turned westward, layering shakers, synths, spurs, and six-string navigations into 12 crooked canyon instrumentals. Shades of spaghetti western, Spacemen 3, and outlaw country whisper in the wind, but ultimately AT’s mode is more silhouette than song, at the axis of campfire jam and commune improv. Loping and loose, windswept and waterless, blowing over the sand of trails long since vanished. Another smoke signal rises in the distance; another scorpion sunset begins to dim. The Wrangler rides on.

Hugh B

Live From The Gonsch

Not Not Fun

Live From The Gonsch showcases Sydney head (and O.T.I.S. label boss) Hugh Burridge aka Hugh B’s lesser known domestic dub mode, low-slung and low volume, tracked on headphones during hidden hours, often with his daughter strapped to his chest. The album’s eight cuts are built from rhythmic modular loops layered with snaky bass, swampy guitar, and occasional hazed vocals, dub-mixed to 2-track cassette through hand-built FX (Burridge runs a boutique delay pedal business). The mood throughout is loose, soupy, and slippery, shaded in echo and spring reverb, glimpsed through tall grass. The title alludes to Burridge’s recently retired Skylab radio show, “Mornings From The Gonsch,” which repped a spectrum of home recorded modes, from bedroom dub to hybrid new age to lost synth songcraft. Here he blends these muses into a woozy fusion all his own, dub-adjacent daydreams of time, money, stasis, and absence, hummed and half-heard beneath a bleached blue sky.

Class

If You've Got Nothing

Feel It

"The Artist works in a museum And that museum is rocknroll In a world of meme punk rockabilly grandads It’s the classicists that really have something to say. Straight lines, hooks, and a clear path to your heart. They might not be dbeat heart throbs But no one else can give you that feeling that you can hold on to a moment Like you are driving too fast down route 60 And it’s never going to end. In 20 years when you skulk the dark alleyways of wherever punk’s red fern grows, they won’t be talking about Dwight Twilley, the Looks, or the Nerves, they will be looking for a little CLASS." —Tobi Vail and Hayes Waring

White Poppy

Sound Of Blue

Not Not Fun

From the grey-skied isles and horse farms of British Columbia comes the second volume of Crystal Dorval aka White Poppy’s “Paradise Gardens” trilogy: Sound Of Blue. Originally conceived back in 2016, the album was then recorded, finessed, abandoned, resurrected, overdubbed, and finally mixed into nine refinements of daydream shoegaze and therapeutic pop, born from bedroom epiphanies and long winters of the heart. From slowdive reverie (“Apathy,” “Melancholic Serenity”) and color wheel psychedelia (“Time”) to spiral chorale (“Happy”) and finger-picked drift (“Wiser”), Dorval’s songcraft moves between escape and acceptance, tracing delicate melodies from undercurrents of loss, light, and solitude. It’s music for memory gardens and pastel horizons, dreaming of bliss and distance, but bound to the here and now: “Thinking about leaving here forever / thinking about leaving here for good / but I keep holding on for something / hoping that it could get better than this / what’s one more night?”

Ruin Lust

Dissimulant

20 Buck Spin

ON LIMITED BLACK / WHITE GALAXY VINYL!!! Having dropped their third album Choir Of Babel in early 2020 just before the world shut down, the forces of pandemic did not succeed in silencing NYC’s Ruin Lust for good. Though confined to their fallout bunker, the band, with martial fervor, began work on what has now, three years later, emerged as their fourth album Dissimulant. In the final phase of imperialist rot, Ruin Lust declares war against the festering delusions of a devolving species. The most withering aspects of modern death metal, grinding war metal and black metal’s more bestial tendencies compel this audial exorcism, poisoning the well like a bioweapon spread through open air, suffocating and contemptuous. By the time album closer “Chemical Wind” is done, all that remains are parched bones and desiccated shadows. Barbarically pestilent yet compositionally deliberate, Dissimulant casts a bitter pall and leaves an open wound on the death metal scene for 2023. A militant milestone in the Ruin Lust discography.

Leopardo

Solo Recordings 2019-2022

Feel It

"Tasked with creating the idyllic segues of Wes Anderson’s new reboot of The Shining, Romain Savary puts you in a box with a fox, a computer from 1998 and a bottle of port. It isn’t garden variety, it’s simply a garden; there are bulbous purples and meek yellow-oranges, and where they begin and end is anyone’s guess. It isn’t the pastoral Impressionism of the prior Leopardo LP, on which you can almost hear the sunshine, taste the mountain tops. Just as the Velvets often lived in the oblivion of sunbeams, Leopardo knows the finer things in life are quiet anticipation, rigorous conversation on a scenic drive, minneolas, gusts of wind. Like with the band Cheveu (remember?) you can’t help speculating on a film out of tunes like “Temperature”. There are people who enjoy reading Rimbaud on oceanic vacation as much as they like blowing lines off a washing machine in a Midwest winter basement, and this is for that type of lifer."—Brandon Gaffney

Single Bullet Theory

C. '79

Feel It

"My first image of Single Bullet Theory was a little oasis of attitude on a flatbed truck in an empty lot in conservative downtown Richmond, Virginia, during a music festival in 1977. I’d had enough of drunken preppies and good ole boys. I wanted a sound to match my mood. Single Bullet Theory was the right band for the moment. They didn’t sound like any band in town. They didn’t look like one either. The lead singer, alternating between guitar and sax, wore his dark hair Prince Valiant style, with a tailored white jacket and a large shiny saxophone pin on his lapel. They absolutely tore it up, and afterwards my ears rang for three days. The band had formed in 1976 from the ashes of Big Naptar, Crossbreed, and X-Breed, bands which had mixed cover songs and originals with a garage, punk feel. Their edgy style matched their origins in the bohemian art school culture of Richmond’s Fan District neighborhood in the 1970s, as a fresh wave of music flowed from New York and England brandishing an aggressive sound with a clever attitude to match. SBT took that sound further – loose, high energy and, with three guitars, loud. They made their name playing free warehouse parties and half-dollar cover shows at local bars. In early 1978 the band played at an art opening party for Andy Warhol at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the staid heart of Richmond. More than 6,500 people mobbed the place. This...

Fabricant

Drudge To The Thicket

Profound Lore

Bay Area technical death metal entity Fabricant leverages any musical tool for their riff and song fabrication. Speed, stillness, technicality, simplicity, consonance, dissonance—are all at play for the express purpose of telling the stories of humanity’s hubris, madness, and frailty. Fabricant glimpsed into this black vortex, extracted the raw materials of inspiration, and refined the chaos into the ten fully actualized death metal songs on their debut album Drudge To The Thicket. This album was Fabricant’s obsession: a forbidden riddle to solve. From its beginnings stretching as far back as their 2010 demo and to its ultimate end, this album inhabited the deepest recesses of their minds as an omnipresent consumer of thought. With the arrival of this debut, the band frees themselves of this thicket. The battle was hard-won, but the next ones inexorably begin. From new obsessions to delirium to the mundane, consciousness marches onwards, screaming out at all of existence for answers, only to feebly fall on deaf ears. Descend into the chaos with Fabricant.

Leimer, K.

Spall

Palace Of Lights

Write. Record. Break. Recategorize. Reassemble. In K. Leimer’s most recent work, he returns to his long-running interest in developing relationships in sound that are not composed, not planned, not under conscious influence or control. Phrases and patterns emerge from dense layering and editing; melodic elements are split apart, re-voiced and reset in successive contexts. A music of distressed fragments, Spall originates from acoustic, electric, synthesized, manipulated, torn, and piece-work audio that combines into complex, layered, and flowing pieces of unexpected turns and contrasts. Modified, melted, and shaped into shifting sonic environments that fuse the clear signal with the distorted, the recognizable with ambiguous, Spall is music mined from an abandoned quarry.

Gutteridge, Peter

Pure

Superior Viaduct

In the swirl of underground music emerging from Dunedin, New Zealand in the 1980s, Peter Gutteridge stands as one of the era’s most intense and shadowy figures. Despite being a founding member of The Clean and The Chills, Gutteridge would eschew indie-rock fame for the hypnotic and driving sounds of his later bands such as Snapper. Fittingly, it is Pure—Gutteridge’s lone solo album of intimate home recordings—that serves as the most revealing and celebrated release of his career. As Peter Jefferies writes in the liner notes, “That’s what’s so good about Pure. Not only the songs, but the name, the name for the recording. It is as pure as you can get. That’s the real deal, when it goes from nothing to something and he catches it on his machine.” Originally released on cassette in 1989 on Xpressway, Pure documents Gutteridge’s stunning use of 4-track as instrument. Featuring lo-fi pop gems and interstitial sketches, the LP combines densely layered keyboards and guitars, distorted drum machines and possessed-sounding vocals to create a truly singular work of undistilled artistic vision. While Gutteridge denied that he was the architect of the “Dunedin Sound,” Pure sits comfortably next to the most revered Flying Nun releases of its time. Shifting exquisitely from churning rattle to an airy ease without losing momentum, these twenty-one songs hold a lasting place in the canon of DIY music. Recommended for fans of Syd Barrett, Jim Shepard and early Fad Gadget. Includes drawing chosen by Peter’s family.

Consensus Madness

s/t

Iron Lung

***Seven scratchy punk gems channeling a thing in which disaffected youth and energetic misfits alike can rally against the snow-soaked blandness of the Illinoian city they inhabit. Running the gamut from the proto-punk mayhem of DV8 to the early hardcore toughness of The Effigies and from the sinister outsider art of The Tyrades to the comparatively sophisticated Plasmatics. A thrilling statement of middle-finger intensity and rule smashing iconoclasm. Consensus Madness skirts the edges of chaos and good taste, holding a mirror up to society’s ugly underbelly. “They’re good, bratty fun.”—Paul R.

Dank Goblins

Fruity Cigars

Iron Lung

***DANK GOBLINS' debut Fruity Cigars is a drowsy instrumental hip-hop collaboration featuring West Bay all stars LUKE SICK, FRANK MARCHI and ANDRES WADE with DJ EONS in the mastermind position. Using primarily live instrumentation and only a few samples for splash of color, Eons has crafted a wholly unique amalgamation of unsettling atmosphere and grimy beats chilled to bone with a creeping darkness that will leave you shivering with the paranoia of your future crumbling around you while the world around you get swallowed in the name of progress. ”Highly” recommended.

Hatred Surge

Horrible Mess 2005-2007

Iron Lung

***Pulverizing grindcore meets raging powerviolence perfection. Need we say more? Horrible Mess collects everything Hatred Surge recorded between 2005 and 2007. This is the first time these tracks have been available on vinyl since they were originally released.