This Week’s New Music

A.A. Williams

Solstice (Reigning Phoenix)

UK | Indie Folk // Gothic // Doomgaze

Apostle

A Splinter in the Infinite Noumenon (Terminus Hate City)

USA | Atmospheric Black Metal // Post-Metal

August Burns Red

Season of Surrender (Fearless)

USA | Metalcore // Progressive Metal

Bedouine

Neon Summer Skin (Thirty Tigers)

USA | Indie Folk

Bella White

A Sign in the Weather (Rounder)

CANADA | Folk // Country // Bluegrass

Blood Incantation

All Gates Open (Century)

USA | Ambient // Progressive Electronic

Converge

Hum of Hurt (Epitaph)

USA | Metalcore // Hardcore

Death Cab for Cutie

I Built You a Tower (Anti-)

USA | Indie Rock // Indie Pop // Emo

Deer Tick

Coin-O-Matic (ATO)

USA | Americana // Country Rock

Evanescence

Sanctuary (BMG)

USA | Nu-Metal // Hard Rock

Evergrey

Architects of a New Weave (Napalm)

SWEDEN | Progressive Metal // Gothic // Power Metal

Fatoumata Diawara

Massa (No Format)

FRANCE | Art Pop // Folk

Fink

The City is Coming to Erase It All (label unknown)

GERMANY | Indie Folk // Blues

Hvdes

The Sunken Cathedral (Ophelia)

USA | House // Trance

Jalen Ngonda

Doctrine of Love (Daptone)

UK | Soul // R&B

Les Big Byrd

Ruin Everything (Chimp Limbs)

SWEDEN | Psychedelic // Rock

Liz Lawrence

Vespers (Chrysalis)

UK | Indie Rock // Indie Pop

Lizzo

Bitch (Nice Life)

USA | Pop // Hip-Hop

Midrift

Silhouette (independent)

USA | Shoegaze

Modest Mouse

An Eraser and a Maze (Glacial Pace)

USA | Indie Rock

Niall Horan

Dinner Party (Capitol)

IRELAND | Pop // Folk

of Montreal

Aethermead (Polyvinyl)

USA | Psychedelic // Indie Pop

Oh Hiroshima

And the Dead Tree Gives No Shelter (Pelagic)

SWEDEN | Post-Rock

Old Crow Medicine Show

Union Made (Hartland)

USA | Alt-Country // Bluegrass

Overpass

Elsewhere, Always (Communion)

UK | Indie Rock // Alt-Rock

Paul Wall

Fortune & Glory (independent)

USA | Hip-Hop

Seahaven

Seahaven (Pure Noise)

USA | Alt-Rock // Emo

Slift

Fantasia (Sub Pop)

FRANCE | Stoner Metal // Heavy Psych

Together to the Stars

Iridescence (independent)

SWEDEN | Blackgaze // Atmospheric Black Metal // Screamo

Vansire

Taking Solace (independent)

USA | Dream Pop

Vince Staples

Cry Baby (Loma Vista)

USA | Hip-Hop

Widowspeak

Roses (Captured Tracks)

USA | Dream Pop // Indie Folk // Slowcore

And thanks for reading! On to the next one!

70:10 // May 29, 2026 // Warp Records

In retrospect, we all should have known that April 6th, 2026 would be no ordinary day. For starters, my father turned 61 years old, and anything involving prime numbers is bound to invite some witchcraft into our dimension. The tomfoolery continued with the Michigan Wolverines emerging victorious in March Madness by employing a mercenary squad of aged-out graduate students, before culminating with the day’s most ominous, yet exciting discovery. On the surface, it was nothing more than a simple package delivery. It contained nothing in it but a nondescript VHS tape, blank save for the seven hexagons emblazoned on it like mystical runes. Whether one wished to chalk it up to the phases of the moon, the restless motion of the underworld, or the concerning spike of cultlike groupthink throughout the globe, the meaning behind the message was immediately apparent; Boards of Canada were so fucking back.

To be able to listen to Inferno, the brotherly duo’s fifth full-length album, nearly a full thirteen years after the release of Tomorrow’s Harvest, feels both salvific and darkly prophetic. Looking beyond the thematic resonance of a title like Inferno, one only needs to reflect on the bleak and hopeless emotions conjured up by Tomorrow’s Harvest to get their finger on the pulse of the group’s worldview. Ice-cold synths and imagery of barren wastelands dominated tracks like “White Cyclosa” and “Sick Times”, while closing track “Semena Mertvykh” kindly blessed listeners with a final impression of pure nightmare fuel to hang onto for the next decade and change. As Boards of Canada have continued to double down on their silence, it has felt like the world around us has doubled down on its intent to destabilize and divide itself. For this reason, it’s not only worth asking what a Boards of Canada album sounds like in 2026, but what a Boards of Canada album sounds like in this 2026, the timeline that feels like one of the most catastrophic possible rolls of the dice.

Sonically, Inferno can be considered a faithful amalgamation of Geogaddi’s themes, The Campfire Headphase’s approach to instrumentation, and the mood of Tomorrow’s Harvest, while expanding each of these aspects into an identity all its own. Geogaddi, this writer’s personal favorite BoC release, has long been praised and dissected for its eeriness, although its strongest common thread with Inferno remains the theme of belief. The way that album was able to juxtapose the euphoric cultlike explorations of “1969” or “From One Source All Things Depend” with the subtle dread of “The Devil Is In The Details” has not necessarily been replicated on Inferno, although its thematic significance has been deepened in a way. Much praise has already been heaped on early fan favorite “Naraka”, an infectious groove with spacey synths that open up into a truly transcendent coda marked by processed chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra. Compare and contrast this triumphant spiritual awakening with the needling terror of “Father and Son”, a nerve-frying exploration of the tails side of belief’s coin, an inescapable drug capable of destroying lives, relationships, even entire communities.

“Father and Son” also displays the group’s willingness to tweak their approach to songwriting 30+ years into their career, showcasing a more straightforward and narrative approach to vocal sampling that positions the album’s themes front and center. Previously released single “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” utilizes samples of a lecture on consciousness from Seyyed Hossein Nasr to similar effect, distorting them just enough to make them sound as if they originate from the source of consciousness itself. As the first full-length track on the album, “Prophecy” also resurrects Campfire’s penchant for live instrumentation, being defined by a booming drum kit and psychedelic guitar leads for its first three minutes. As the tracklist progresses, these live instruments descend further into the uncanny valley, whether it be the dizzying guitar/synth blend of “Somewhere Right Now in the Future”, the queasy labyrinth of “Into the Magic Land”, or the heart-stopping guitar lead that catapults “Deep Time” (formerly known as “Tape 05”!) into the stratosphere.

31 years out from the release of Twoism, Boards of Canada are still succeeding at evoking seemingly contradictory bursts of emotion on Inferno. In contrast to the method of accomplishing this on Tomorrow’s Harvest, Inferno opts to use warmth as a kind of rug pull before burying the listener back underneath the sound waves of the apocalypse. It’s no coincidence that the stunning “Age of Capricorn”, the album’s shining moment of angelic ambient brilliance, transitions seamlessly into the sonic sleep paralysis of “Father and Son”. Other drumless tone pieces like “Memory Death” and closer “I Saw Through Platonia” subsist off of startling and unexpected chord changes, the consistent and off-putting beep of a hospital monitor, and returns to the tonic that somehow soothe every anxious impulse created by the listener’s progression through the circles of hell. Even ethereal moments like “Naraka” utilize jarring musical intervals in their bass lines to brilliant effect, making it feel as though something is always a bit unstable beneath the surface, off just enough to prevent its musical landscape from becoming fully trustworthy.

As artists, however, Boards of Canada re-establish themselves as fully trustworthy with Inferno, a stunning release that only further serves to cement their legacy as titans of the electronic and IDM worlds. It’s a stunning, calming, terrifying, surprising, and familiar record at all turns, one that illustrates the duo’s ability to wear every sort of hat and maintain their musical identity underneath it all. If thirteen years of waiting is what it takes to receive an effort of this caliber, then this writer is all for it, even if he would really prefer a shorter period of downtime before the next foreboding package gets sent in the mail.

9/10.

Yo Yo, check out these highlight tracks:

-Prophecy at 1420 MHz

-Age of Capricorn

-Father and Son

-Naraka

-Into the Magic Land

-Deep Time

-You Retreat In Time and Space

Welcome, or welcome back, to Permanent Waves, a weekly-ish expedition into the power pop (and beyond!) of the year 1980.

Rebounding a bit from a week of few highlights last time, another light docket: Six albums, no ZAMNs, no bullshit. Let’s mindset.

France Gall - Paris, France

This French gal named France Gall has a new album recorded in Paris, France called Paris, France! As you may have deduced, this is sung entirely in French, a language I took three years of in high school and retained just enough to recognize a small handful of individual words in this tracklist (“chanteuse” is “singer”! “Parler” is “Talk”!) but not nearly enough to actually understand it just listening along. It’s eminently listenable nonetheless though, lushly arranged and abundantly tuneful edgeless pop in much the same vein as Gall’s fellow Eurovision winners ABBA. Maybe I’m letting it off easy for its novelty factor, but hey, French is one of the most aurally pleasant languages around in my humble opinion— Who am I to discount love songs sung in the language of love?

VERDICT: NICE

KISS - Unmasked

The KISS guarantee was always that a couple songs per album would be catchy and harmless enough that you gave up on feeling guilty for enjoying them— I won’t die on a hill for ‘em, but I’m never unhappy to hear crunchy, dumb-fun pop like “Detroit Rock City” or their ‘79 disco cashout “I Was Made For Lovin’ You”. Sadly, the latter pissed away a good deal of their teen-dude fanbase’s goodwill, and this one probably won’t undo much of the damage. The worst thing I can say about Unmasked is that it’s just a garden-variety boring power pop album like a hundred thousand others; even their sexism is toothless. Biggest red flag going in: the wiseacre on the cover cartoon snarking that they “still stink”. Could there possibly be another band less suited to arch self-awareness?

VERDICT: SKIP

Diana Ross - Diana

My familiarity with beloved megaselling pop dynamo Diana Ross could be generously described as “patchy”. I know she was the frontwoman of The Supremes, but the only Supremes album I’ve heard is I Hear A Symphony (which I like a lot!), and I know she’s been very successful as a solo act, but the only single of hers I could name before this year is her cover of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (which isn’t as good as the Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell original!). Happy day, though, 1980 brings about a second Diana single I can remember off the dome: “I’m Coming Out”, a wonderful, ebullient bit of lite funk inspired by producer Nile Rogers meeting drag queens dressed as Ross. Unfortunately, the rest of Diana doesn’t do too too much for me; it’s hard to believe it’s the result of a whole kerfuffle where Ross thought the album needed to sound less disco-y, because I haven’t heard an artist so stuck in the Saturday Night Fever since Sylvester all the way back in week 2. She has the pipes for it, and Rogers is in rare form on guitar, but there’s nothing here that hits as hard as the highlights on Warm Leatherette, and it’s repetitive enough to be a little bit annoying as background music.

VERDICT: FINE

Roxy Music - Flesh and Blood

I was going to sheepishly apologize for not really loving Roxy Music’s acclaimed and influential early work with which Brian Eno got his start, but y’know what? I don’t owe Roxy Music jackshit just because they’re artsy and ambitious and have things to say about the sinister emptiness of modern consumer culture! I certainly don’t blame any of their fans for finding Flesh and Blood dumbed-down or even sold-out compared to more pointedly political fare like “In Every Dream Home A Heartache”, but power pop mindset demands a soaring, sentimental chorus, and “Oh Yeah!” delivers in spades— for what it’s worth, I find the same germ of unshakeable lonely cynicism in both songs, the latter just has that added spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. The rest of Flesh and Blood could fairly be called overproduced, but they’ve always worn artifice well, and the instrumental flourish is far from gone (check that funky little bassline on “Same Old Scene”!) Mindset of the week: There’s a band playing on the radio / and it’s drowning the sound of my tears

VERDICT: NICE

The English Beat - I Just Can’t Stop It

Not bad! Not really my cuppa either, though, and certainly not as much of a blast as Bad Manners was only a few short weeks back. It would be rude (and not in the positive ska-lingo sense!) to not draw a firm distinction between a fundamentally crossover group like The Police, who have never claimed any serious allegiance to Jamaican music despite being obviously influenced by it, and a band like The (English) Beat, who faithfully recreate the skankin’ rhythms and soulful island vibes of The Congos and The Wailers. HOWEVER, the punkish zip with which they imbue those rhythms and vibes is unmistakably similar, in particular that signature shimmery new wave guitar sound. I guess my point is that when that rare mood strikes me, I’m either gonna want the original article (i.e. The Heart of the Congos) or something that’s pure goofs and laffs (i.e. Ska ‘n’ B), and as talented as these fellas surely are, they just don’t quite scratch either itch.

VERDICT: FINE

Yachts - Without Radar

Liverpool’s own Yachts have plenty going for them on paper, but in the game of power pop looking good on paper is a red flag more often than it’s a meal ticket. Their pedigree (opening for Elvis Costello and eventually leaving Stiff Records alongside him, Nick Lowe and label co-founder Jake Riviera) speaks to their strong fundamentals, namely a lighthearted comedic sensibility and a nimble keyboardist in frontman Henry Priestman. I gotta steal Christgau’s assessment of their 1978 debut for this one, though: “their biggest joke is a mock-snooty, mock-operatic rock crooning style that I’m not eager to hear again”. It’ll pass the time inoffensively if you’re an absolute new wave completionist and don’t mind a slightly cheap, weedy keyboard sound front and center. Lucky for them, that’s me to a tee.

VERDICT: FINE

Albums can be good, but albums can also be bad. On top of this, good albums can contain bad songs, and… bad albums can contain good songs. Sometimes that good song is a highly misleading single, other times it’s an unexpected deep cut outperforming everything else: whatever it may be, I would like to highlight SEVEN lovely songs on not-very-lovely records: tracks that would otherwise most likely be forgotten due to the fact that they come as a shitty package deal.

Turnover - Ain’t Love Heavy

Turnover’s 2022 album Myself in the Way is pretty ass. It’s a mind-numbingly boring exploration of “”psychedelic”” vibes on a canvas of sheer boredom, and rarely abandons its framework of squeaky-clean synths + apathetic vocals. Thankfully, “Ain’t Love Heavy” does slightly more and turns into a rather lovely song. In all fairness, this is in large part due to Bre Morell’s silk-like vocals adorning the entire second half of the song: when paired with a more interesting vocalist, Turnover’s lazy-sounding instrumentals suddenly make a lot more sense. It’s a lovely vibey song that you can dance to, but only on the tiniest of dancefloors.

Poppy - The Attic

Name me a single song off of Poppy’s album Zig that isn’t “The Attic”, I dare you. Okay, sure, the title track’s main hook is sort of memorable in all the wrong ways: I don’t remember the melody, but I believe its lyrics are “you zig, I zag”. Riveting stuff. Anyway, “The Attic” is a delightful song: its choppy beat contrasts beautifully with the ever-expanding dreamy chorus, and it feels like what the album could and should have been. Instead, the other ten tracks on that album are entirely forgettable.

Knuckle Puck - Into the Blue

20/20, Knuckle Puck’s album that came out in 2020, ha ha get it, isn’t very good. It’s a collection of absolute nothingburger pop punk songs. In all fairness, most of those songs aren’t that bad, they’re just not interesting (not even by pop punk standards). However, buried deep in the track list, one will find “Into the Blue”: a song with a sharp hook, bouncy choruses, and non-cringy vocals. What more could a pop punk song need, amirite?

Bad Omens - NERVOUS SYSTEM

While this SEVEN is about bad albums, I do think that Bad Omens’ CONCRETE JUNGLE [THE OST] is interesting in that it’s just kind of dumb. It’s quite plainly a “buying time” project: some remixes, some live songs, some new songs that are pretty whatever. For the most part, these new songs highlight the quote unquote industrial elements of the band’s sound. Also for the most part, it doesn’t work. Thankfully, “NERVOUS SYSTEM” is the exception: iRis.EXE’s vocals add a lot to the hypnotic-but-not-overblown-for-once soundscape, making for a perfectly great song. Is it worth sitting through an hour and a half of slop for this track? Probably not.

Chalk - Pain

I’m not quite sure what happened to Chalk. Their EPs are decent-to-excellent hardcore-infused post punk, but their debut full length is mostly awkward-sounding dancey punk. It’s a shame, especially given the fact that single “Pain” manages to establish a rather wonderful groove. Even if it doesn’t explode the way their old stuff (three whole years) does, it felt like a productive next step for the band: if only every song managed to be this hypnotic. Oh well, better luck next time.

The Maine - My Best Habit

The Maine kind of fucked up with You Are OK. For the first time ever, the band managed to put out a collection of overproduced and underwritten songs, plummeting from the heights of American Candy and Lovely Little Lonely. As a direct result of the strange production choices, the only moment that stands out is due to its razor-sharp hook: “My Best Habit” is classic The Maine. It’s carefree, it’s catchy as all hell, and, most importantly, it feels like a sugary drink on a summer day. The remainder of the album does, uh, not.

Beartooth - The Last Riff

Perhaps Beartooth hasn’t been very good ever, but Disgusting hit like a ton of bricks when I was sixteen. Their subsequent records, including Below, have mostly been poppy metalcore of various degrees of fastfood, with the band becoming one of the most painfully predictable outfits ever. Verse chorus verse chorus breakdown chorus and onto the next one. This isn’t solely what sets the entirely instrumental “The Last Riff” apart, though: it’s also just… kind of enthralling by its own merits. For whatever excellent reason, Beartooth embrace post-metal and just lock the fuck in for about five minutes, crafting a song that I did not think the band were capable of. If only they did more of that.

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If only. Oh well. Oh yeah. Thank you for reading, and remember to always be the good song on a bad album… or something.

38:38 // May 22, 2026 // 12:01

It feels beyond improbable that Logbook exists. This isn’t only because Crash of Rhinos have gone thirteen years since their last release, but also because the band always felt like a magical flash in the pan, one of the brightest comets in the firmament of emo revival streaking across the sky and then gone in a blaze of glory, whatever grandiose analogy you prefer. The band’s lineup has been involved in other worthy projects both before and after their tenure as Crash of Rhinos, but that one highly-inspired stretch left an impression.

While Crash of Rhinos might not be a household name even among dedicated genre fans, they’re a cult favorite if there ever was one. As a little band that could, they stand apart in a multitude of ways - their Derby, England origins are unusual, marking them as standard-bearers of “Midlands emo” (see what I did there?) in contrast to an American-dominated scene - but their sonic formulations and the underlying spirit of their music always felt utterly distinctive as well. In their original run, debut Distal was more ebullient and follow-up Knots was more reflective in tone, but both featured raucous punk energy, sprawling song structures, and gruff gang vocals which contrasted sharply with the wimpier stylings in vogue elsewhere. Their approach was instantly recognizable for those in the know, and their ability to twist weary malaise into chaotic fist-raising anthems was astounding - the mood was more early Japandroids than Empire! Empire! (I was a Lonely Estate). All that’s to say that Crash of Rhinos were a charming band which I’d thought were gone for good, meriting a worthy footnote in the annals of emo history and a reliable revisit from time to time for my own listening pleasure.

But, wonder of wonders, the band’s back together, and we have a third Crash of Rhinos LP to discuss. As a return, Logbook is far from flashy, although this band was always more about passion and a raw sense of musicality than anything particularly refined. The immediate takeaway is that the band hasn’t lost a step - this is Crash of Rhinos delivering a Crash of Rhinos album like a thirteen year gap hasn’t happened at all, even if the vibe feels a little more well-seasoned (we’ll get to that). It seems unlikely Logbook will be many fans’ favorite album from the band, given its lack of massive standout moments or career highlight tracks, but it’s a consistently strong record which delivers on the band’s core sound without real flaws. Indeed, all seven cuts here are rock-solid additions to the still-miniscule Crash of Rhinos catalog.

The biggest factor which sets Logbook apart from the band’s earlier works is simply Father Time. The musicians still clearly have their fire, which bursts forth in the feisty energy of the up-tempo stretches and the off-key vigorous roaring of the vocals, but the flames are burning a little lower in the grate, as befits a now middle-aged group still feistily defiant in the face of an increasingly dystopian global landscape. In that context, moments like those lines in “Recurring” - “the only choice was burst and fade, or come back around” - and the hooky repetition of “theeeeeeeeeese daaaaaaaays” in “Exercise in Memory” hit that much harder - we may be long past the jubilant aimlessness of the gloriously naive youth which imbued Crash of Rhinos’ original era, but their special brand of emo revival still clicks marvelously.

8.0/10

47:38 // May 15th, 2026 // 3DOT Recordings

From its conception, Periphery has been a dork’s band, an accolade their longstanding trio of fretsmiths have intermittently downplayed and relished: founding member Misha “Bulb” Mansoor irreversibly imbued the project’s chunky chugging with a campy, interwebz-addled sense of humor, Haunted Shores recruit Mark Holcomb and his beautiful, unorthodox chord voicings widened its emotional palette, and Jake “John Petrucci’s nephew” Bowen complements the pair’s compositional quirks like a chameleon. Despite all directions pointing toward hubris, every Periphery album has been defined by this trio’s humility and teamwork, each riff-writer helming a few tracks and leaving ample space for their bandmates to not only prove their mettle as the popularizers of progressive metal they are, but also get mischievous within their own respective pursuits of happiness.

For better or worse, as early as 2012’s Periphery II: This Time It’s Personal, that synergy made itself known on profoundly divisive terms: their songs and projects were defined by excess, a showmanship as impressive as the band was deliberately self-effacing (very), and an unapologetic desire to not solely abide by grim, metal posturing. If the songs happened to be bitter, blaring, and/or inspired by M-rated video games, so be it, but there wasn’t any fun in feigning glum spirits 24/7. Their mileage with audiences inevitably varied—I was the right age at the time to find the range to their approach a thrill, and that nostalgia has lent me an abundance of patience easy to extend to efforts that hindsight now considers inconsistent grab bags. Of note, 2023’s Periphery V: Djent is Not a Genre contains a few hits, but it also felt unnaturally burdened by the shadow of albums past, notably the band’s immediate predecessor and most refined representation of their traits to date, Periphery IV: Hail Stan. The same proficiency, influence, and at times juvenile demeanor remained intact, but gratuitous jazz interludes, orchestral swells, and labyrinthine arrangements indicated some belabored, behind-the-scenes burnout was afoot.

The proof they’ve addressed it is first visible in A Pale White Dot’s metadata: this is Periphery’s first non-self-titled release since their 2015 double album Juggernaut, whose two discs, Alpha and Omega, vaguely gestured toward a narrative of occult vengeance. Count that diptych as one package, and this new LP is also the band’s shortest by a considerable margin. Even more striking, only two of the album’s twelve tracks push past the five-minute mark, both of them barely, a far cry from the multi-suite behemoths on albums of yore. From their own mouths, none of this is coincidental—dreading autopiloting their way into long-winded old habits, the band instead devised a theme, title, and tonal outline for A Pale White Dot from the outset, quickly dismissing fall-back material from their demo junkyard and any new ideas that didn’t feel integral to the inner workings of each song or aligned with the album’s core theme of loneliness.

In turn, the tunes on A Pale White Dot display Periphery as their most uniform, earnest, and truncated selves—no linear story ties one track to another, songs rarely digress from intuitive structures, and when they end, they end—no multi-minute ambient interstices tacked onto their tails. The quintet’s usual hamminess is rarer, too; smile-and-a-wink barnstormers like “Subhuman” or objectionable flop lines (“if the beast is gonna knock / bang bang” from “Unlocking” sticks out) come fewer and further between than before, replaced with a blanketing sobriety stemming from personal struggles with health, grief, and fear—maturation from previously unrepentant rascals pushing age 40.

Prog nerds, fear not: technical riffs remain! Bowen’s arpeggios in “Heaven on High” and Mansoor’s precise patterns in “Talk” have been held aloft as two of the hardest things to play in the band’s discography, and “Mr. God” and “Unlocking” contain some gnarly rhythmic downstroking, but A Pale White Dot by and large positions the once-central guitar as a syncopation driver and a textural tool, rarely the melodic focal point of any song. Sometimes this method dazzles: first single “Mr. God” conjures an incendiary parable about how power insulates and corrupts—perfect for the age of techbros building wasteful supercomputers plagiarism apparatuses and not understanding why they’re loathed by the masses. Even where the guitars take the backseat, like on OCD-inspired opener “Obsession,” pivoting between ominous, sultry synth-pop and furious black metal slamdowns is more than enough to make the band sound in full control at the wheel (Sleep Token, take notes).

As for the elephant in the room, Periphery’s vocalist Spencer Sotelo, a polarizing frontman in his own right due to how hard he leans into the band’s pomp (and possesses the range to get away with it) revels in the spotlight to a nearly uncompromising prevalence on A Pale White Dot. Whether he’s growling so brutally it almost renders Will Ramos’ feature on “Subhuman” inconspicuous or belting soaring, balladeer hooks on “Heaven on High,” “Carry On,” and “Everyone Dies Alone,” the guy takes these sessions’ melancholy and sinks his teeth in, assisted by the quality control of drummer-turned-co-lyricist and session supervisor Matt Halpern.

While the guitarists comparatively step back from the limelight, Sotelo and Halpern, already inextricable from Periphery’s across-the-board talent and temperament, thrust themselves forward in their place to a degree not gleaned since the equitably-penned Clear EP. Sotelo’s lower register occupies a significant portion of his melodic phrasing to mixed returns, and his digitally-affected cleans, while nowhere near as grating as on Periphery V’s “Silhouette,” more regularly indulge pop sensibilities than metal purists (and even some former apologists) may deem welcome. Halpern fares a bit better: his kick work feels especially prominent here, incorporating blast beats and other nutty foot patterns largely uncharacteristic of his ghost note-heavy grooving—but he and Sotelo’s long-since established dexterity prevents A Pale White Dot from feeling like as large a leap of faith as the context might otherwise suggest.

A few interesting conundrums then arise: with the band’s overall zaniness stripped back, the production’s prioritization of mood over clarity (mostly via sludgier low ends and prominent synths), and the vocal performances pushed to the forefront of both the lighter-wavers and the pit-ready ragers, little now separates this once-inimitable group from sounding uncannily similar to the litany of acts (Spiritbox, ERRA, Johnny Booth, etc.) occupying the metalcore-adjacent side of the progressive metal spectrum. If you at any point gravitated to Periphery for their one-of-a-kind neck wizardry or their ability to entertain through meticulous gusto, A Pale White Dot’s streamlined, sanded down sentiments might ring a little hollow. However, anyone who’s been captivated by Periphery’s evolution can attest that it does represent an abandonment of their prior methodology without wiping the canvas clean entirely; any parallels to contemporaneous artists aren’t cynically done with the bottom line in mind, but from a largely successful desire to minimize their own bloat.

The other key problem, one far more damning to the evaluation of this album as an album is that despite its coordinated lyrical themes, the tonal ebb and flow of the sequencing gets increasingly rickety. Sandwiching the ferocity of “Subhuman” between the tripwire rhythms and saccharine crooning of “Unlocking” and the sparse, galactic expanse of “Blackwall” derails the middle of the record right before a stretch of tunes that, while serviceable, pale in comparison to A Pale White Dot’s heavy-hitting opening run. “Carry On,” much like “Heaven on High,” operates on the jarring contrast between its triumphant hook and smoldering breakdowns, but its arrangement feels haphazard, counterintuitive, and too abridged to not feel stilted. “Neon Valley” feels atypically safe for a Periphery song, and penultimate track “Everyone Dies Alone” almost rings true as a tearjerker of the highest caliber, only to end so abruptly that the title track, an otherwise gorgeous acoustic instrumental coda, can’t help but feel like an underwhelming payoff. Individually, each part of this closing run—and the eight tracks immediately preceding it—can more or less support its own weight, but strung together in this particular order, they gradually fray at the album’s initially spotless cohesion.

I suppose it’s fitting then that A Pale White Dot’s cover art, the first in Periphery’s discography to not feature their capital P or three-dot logo, instead features a series of partially-eclipsed outlines. Mansoor has stated in interviews that each circle is meant to represent a constituent song, invoking the paradox of isolation: those who feel the loneliest are often rarely far from others who know that very same pain. Combining the light they’re still able to emit can yield a body illuminating and strong, it’s true—just look at how these oddballs have rewritten the prog metal playbook for a decade and a half. The irony, of course, is that A Pale White Dot is the opposite: an LP of pieces more impressive than their collective sum and ultimately closer to a lateral shimmy than a determined, firm-footed trek towards horizons truly unseen.

7.5/10

This Week’s New Music

‘68

They Are Survived (independent)

USA | Noise Rock // Post-Hardcore // Blues

All Them Witches

House of Mirrors (BMG)

USA | Stoner Rock // Psychedelic // Blues

Aural Imbalance

Fragile Shapes (Spatial)

UK | Jungle // Drum & Bass

Balmora

These Graven Halls (Daze)

USA | Metalcore // Melodic Death Metal

Boards of Canada

Inferno (Warp)

UK | IDM // Downtempo // Progressive Electronic

Booba

Blanco Nemesis (Tallac)

FRANCE | Hip-Hop

Brian Jackson

Now More Than Ever (Barely Breaking Even)

USA | Soul // Jazz // Funk

Devin Townsend

The Moth (HevyDevy)

CANADA | Progressive Metal

Doublespeak

Doublespeak (London)

UK | Synthpop

Elder

Through Zero (Blues Funeral)

GERMANY | Heavy Psych // Progressive Rock

Erdve

Epigrama (Season of Mist)

LITHUANIA | Sludge Metal // Metalcore

Francis of Delirium

Run, Run Pure Beauty (Dalliance)

LUXEMBOURG | Indie Rock // Grunge

Funebrarum

Beckoning the Void of Eternal Silence (Pulverised)

USA | Death Metal // Doom Metal

Godthrymm

Projections (Profound Lore)

UK | Doom Metal // Heavy Metal

Greg Mendez

Beauty Land (Dead Oceans)

USA | Indie Folk // Alt-Country // Slacker Rock

Guided by Voices

Crawlspace of the Pantheon (GBV)

USA | Indie Rock // Lo-Fi

Halkyn

Halkyn (555)

UK | Folk // Experimental

Iceage

For Love of Grace & the Hereafter (Mexican Summer)

DENMARK | Punk // Alternative Rock

Kiefer Sutherland

Grey (Maple Creek)

USA | Americana // Folk

Kim Petras

Detour (BunHead)

USA | Pop // Synthpop

Kurt Vile

Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me (Verve)

USA | Americana // Indie Rock // Psychedelic

Lenka

Good Days (Skipalong)

AUSTRALIA | Pop // Soul

Manchester Orchestra

Union Chapel (London, England) (Loma Vista)

USA | Indie Rock // Alternative Rock

Monolord

Neverending (Relapse)

SWEDEN | Doom Metal // Stoner Metal

Oakwood

Blurred Away (Memory Music)

USA | Emo // Screamo

Paul McCartney

The Boys of Dungeon Lane (Capitol)

UK | Pop Rock

Serpent Lord

The Once Forgotten Ways of Old (Eisenwald)

USA | Atmospheric Black Metal

Shed

Rave Echoes (Dekmantel)

GERMANY | Techno // Minimal

Shinedown

EI8HT (Atlantic)

USA | Hard Rock // Post-Grunge

Sparta

Cut a Silhouette (Equal Vision)

USA | Post-Hardcore // Alternative Rock

Static Dress

Injury Episode (Sumerian)

UK | Post-Hardcore // Emo // Metalcore

Turnover

Down to Earth (Community)

USA | Emo // Dream Pop // Indie Rock

Willie Nelson

Dream Chaser (Legacy)

USA | Country // Americana

Wolf & Bear

A Hill to Die On (Blue Swan)

USA | Post-Hardcore // Progressive Rock

Yazz Ahmed

Shinrin-Yoku (Night Time Stories)

UK | Jazz Fusion

Thanks for reading! Until next week!

Welcome, or welcome back, to Permanent Waves, a weekly-ish expedition into the power pop (and beyond!) of the year 1980.

Eight albums this week, and maybe I’m just stressed from other stuff but most of it was none too impressive— with one BIG exception! Who’s the lucky duck? Read on to find out. Let’s mindset.

Elton John - 21 at 33

The Bitch is BACK from a truly embarrassing ‘79 whiff at disco with an album of nominally less embarrassing over-produced yacht rock featuring boring Toto guitarist Steve Lukather, boring Captain & Tennille non-Captain Toni Tennille, and former boring Eagles Don Henley and the other one. I quite like the camaraderie and terse bounce of “Two Rooms At The End of the World”, and Tom Robinson does a fine job co-writing the lyrics of “Sartorial Eloquence” and “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again”, though the over-production still murders the latter. He sounds like he’s doing better coke than he was last year, and more of it, but still not enough to be much fun, and an Elton album without fun isn’t any good to anybody.

VERDICT: SKIP

Devo - Freedom of Choice

I like Devo, but I don’t love them, and even sort of think of loving Devo as some signifier of self-impressed wake up sheeple misanthropy. So, I hold ‘em at arms’ length, I suppose, but that’s partly because I do see the appeal, really: they make you feel clever for listening to them, and their angular synthesizers do a good job of winking at the camera. I also think that Duty Now For the Future is a lot better than Q: Are We Not Men?, and even though Freedom of Choice is more uneven than Duty, it reaffirms my hunch that Devo is a much better pop band than they are a punk band. “Whip It” is simply too weird and earworm-y to ignore, and you can really tell it was written by men with an autistic fixation on advertising jingles. “Girl U Want” might be their best song yet, almost as funny as “Wiggly World” and even catchier to compensate. And “Gates of Steel” is a very solid deep cut. They’re still at arms’ length, though, because they’re still self-impressed enough to fill half an album with half-written attempts to recreate the singles, and misanthropic enough to try and pass it off as political commentary.

VERDICT: FINE

Crack the Skye - White Music

I am not quite up to speed on vaguely prog-ish West Virginia rockers Crack the Skye (I guess they switched lead singers on the last album and now the original guy is back?), because I was really unimpressed by their 1975 self-titled debut. They seemed like a band with no real idea of who they wanted to be and no particular talents that might point them towards something interesting. Lucky for them, there are few demographics power pop mindset is better suited for, and on the oh so cleverly titled White Music, the proof is in the pudding! Bandleader John Palumbo’s sense of humor is still a bit prosaic by new wave standards, but that doesn’t mean he can’t get plenty of mileage out of emulating Remote Control-era Tubes on “Skin Deep”, or Introducing Sparks-era Sparks on “All American Boy”. “Hot Razors” and “Songs of Soviet Sons” are both still only a gallon of canned reverb away from being stuffy, sweaty Foreigner songs, though, and all “Techni Generation” proves is that Fee Waybill level charisma goes a long, long way towards selling Remote Control level cynicism. Points earned for pandering, regardless.

VERDICT: FINE

Bram Tchaikovsky - The Russians Are Coming

Former ugliest member of The Motors Pete “Bram Tchaikovsky” Bramall kicked off a solo career last year rather stylishly with Strange Man, Changed Man, a collection of slight, obvious power pop that leaned hard on a super-layered, dense mix of harmonized vocals upon beefy, glistening power chords upon harmonized vocals upon yet MORE harmonized vocals. It was kind of gimmicky, sure, but plenty of weaker gimmicks have birthed worthy careers, no? Sadly, Mr. Tchaikovsky’s second symphony finds him regressing into all of glam’s hoariest and basest tropes. With the addition of horns and Thin-Lizzy style twinned guitar leads the overall effect is smothering, impenetrable in the worst way. I can hear a fun summertime jam buried somewhere in here, especially on the comparatively restrained “Heartache”, but boy, is it ever buried.

VERDICT: SKIP

Paul McCartney - McCartney II

I resisted it as long as I could, but “Coming Up” finally won me over— or wore me down, whatever. Lucky thing for me it’s already a single, since only one other chune here, the treacly “Waterfalls”, achieves even a modicum of the pop resonance Macca’s had trademarked since ‘64. the rest ranges from adolescent and purposefully grating (headache synth pop “Temporary Secretary”, headache dub reggae “Darkroom”) to childish and purposelessly grating (“Frozen Jap” and “Bogey Music”, ‘nuff said). McCartney II is every bit as half-formed and first-draft as its 1970 predecessor, and its context can’t even give it the same parasocial boost because less than a year later, nobody really seems to miss Paul’s old band. I do miss them though, dammit, and we all still miss his old old band. Mindset of the week: You want a friend you can rely on / One who will never fade away / And if you’re searching for an answer / Stick around, I say

VERDICT: SKIP

Sorrows - Teenage Heartbreak

In 1975, Sorrows frontman Arthur Alexander was covering an obscure bit of Beatles prehistory called “Love of the Loved” for the B-side of his old band Poppee’s single on Bomp! Records. Now, I’m just a rank-and-file power pop lover, and I won’t presume to know better about the genre than a head honcho like Greg Shaw. But I’ll venture he’d agree with me that he’s always been an easy lay for anything vaguely merseybeat, and in the past five years Alexander has seemingly not learned to offer the music world much more than the same old whiff of Beatlemania that probably got him signed in the first place. I’d also venture Greg Shaw would agree with me that he could have invested in Teenage Heartbreak more effectively than Epic Records did: very cheap, tinny production sound on this thing, which is unfortunate since Alexander is such a mediocre vocalist. Small comfort that no songs of note have truly gone to waste.

VERDICT: SKIP

The Heats - Have An Idea

When I call something “orthodox power pop”, it means striving to stay as absolutely faithful to the sound of the British invasion circa 1965/1966 as possible. Seattle’s The Heats are as orthodox as power pop comes: to call them “pub rock” would imply an interest in the blues or rockabilly that isn’t anywhere to be heard here. Early on in this series I accused The Romantics of being talented “wasters” who lacked the ambition to meaningfully build on their influences. Have An Idea is a great example of what I mean by that: it’s more generous (at fourteen tracks in the same runtime as The Romantics’ eleven), funnier between the titular opener and closer “Let’s All Smoke”, and less emotionally distant (in particular the sharply-observed youthful angst of “Remember Me”, “Ordinary Girls”, and “Call Yourself A Man”, all too universal for a mindset of the week). And at least half of the melodies are quite simply unimpeachable. The Knack should be the ones opening for them.

VERDICT: ZAMN

Joan Jett - Joan Jett

There’s something that feels fundamentally prefab about Joan Jett— obviously, she literally got her start in a prefab rock band, roped into a shady manager’s plot to cash in on the alluring image of chix with guitarz. The harsh truth is that the industry hasn’t been good enough to Jett for her solo debut to show off much in the way of newfound creative freedom: Joan Jett has fewer Joan Jett songwriting credits than The Runaways’ 1977 commercial flop Waitin’ for the Night. This thing is stuffed with covers: Her “Wooly Bully” is stiffer and more self-conscious than Bad Manners’, her “Shout” and her “You Don’t Own Me” are paint-by-numbers, and her two (2) Gary Glitter covers are no less empty than the original articles. The even harsher truth is that the industry hasn’t been bad enough to Jett for her to get more than one great song out of her “disillusionment”. That one song really is damn great though, and the Roll-Ups are a worthy backing band throughout. If the name of the game is girl power, she looks like a real lightweight next to Polly Styrene or Wendy O. Williams, but I can’t just write her off: her taste for glam puts her closer to my wavelength than either. Here’s hoping her next album puts that taste to more inspired ends.

VERDICT: FINE

42:15 // May 22, 2026 // Etxe

I approached Broommaker’s Hourglass without expectations or context, enamored with a charming piece of album artwork. And I’m sure glad I gave it a try, as this record is a nice little gem.

Crafted by a Washington, DC chamber folk collective, there’s something rather airy about the arrangements here, whether gentle piano, elegiac strings, or weepy pedal steel, the melancholy instrumentation feels comfortable and rather cozy. They invariably serve as backdrops to the narratives lead singer Greg Svitil churns out - he’s our gruff-voiced narrator, half-whispering sad-to-the-bone poetry. At any given time, Svitil’s delivery calls to mind Bob Dylan, Bill Callahan, Tom Waits, or Mark Linkous - all of those names serve as a recommendation, but their diversity reveals he’s not a carbon copy of any icon.

Hourglass is an album which is reliable in delivering dreamily sorrowful mood music, and is great throughout for that purpose, but it’s undoubtedly a release defined by notable highlights. The three obvious picks for me are the deeply moving “Caroline” (the track that first made me perk up my ears and say “hmmm, this might be something special”), the haunting “Written on their Arms”, depicting the generational horrors of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the sublime closer “Watching from the Wings” - each of those tracks sees the signature sound of Hourglass honed to near-perfection. The other eight songs here don’t seem quite on that level, or perhaps they haven’t hit me yet, but for a low-energy yet high-emotion listen, this is quite an album. Don’t let it pass you by.

8.0/10

Avast ye, me hearties, the time has come once again to engage in some numeric tomfoolery. Being tasked with conjuring up septuple shenanigans has required me to ascend into the mathematical spirit plane to determine a topic for today’s column, which left me contemplating outside of my body in the non-Euclidean æther for what felt like æons. Thankfully, Swedish metal drummer Tomas Haake arrived to re-insert me into my physical vessel and download SEVEN of the most metrically mind-bending Meshuggah riffs into my consciousness for me to break down. Let’s take a dive into the grooviest band of all time’s deepest pockets, but not such a deep dive that we astral project again.

“Future Breed Machine”

From Destroy Erase Improve (1995)

Timestamp: 3:42

Meshuggah’s 1990’s output isn’t quite as overtly complex as their future work, but albums like Destroy Erase Improve and Chaosphere make up for this with their pure ferocity. “Future Breed Machine”’s legendary breakdown is one of the simplest examples of Meshuggah’s iconic rhythmic style, and remains a member of the band’s pantheon of signature songs 31 years down the line because of it, and of all its other unforgettable riffs. What exactly is this style? YouTuber Metal Music Theory explains it succinctly in the video below with the following quote:

“Looping asymmetric guitar riff patterns, which phase against quadruple meter backbeats, and are truncated to realign at hypermetric boundaries.”

Not only does that quote sound like a potential inspiration for whatever lyrics the band are currently working on, it also captures the exact aural trickery the group has been using from the very moment they put this song out. “Quadruple meter backbeats” refer to Haake’s snare (usually) always remaining on beat 3 of the measure, as Meshuggah will tell you that all of their riffs are in 4/4. Those “asymmetric” guitar riffs will wander off into errant subdivisions or unpredictable syncopation, linking back up with drums on beat 1 when they arrive at some number divisible by 4; in the case of “Future Breed Machine”’s breakdown, that number is 28 eighth notes. Using the following key, see if you can decipher the rhythm of this track!

28 = 4 + SEVEN + SEVEN + SEVEN + 3

“Concatenation”

From Chaosphere (1998)

Timestamp: 0:00

We’re two songs in and I’m already breaking a rule of Meshuggah’s rhythmic style with this example, but trust me, this track is worth it. The intro riff of “Concatenation” features no quadruple meter backbeat to be found, with Tomas Haake instead making the decision to link his snare up with the jagged accents of Fredrik Thordendal and Mårten Hagström’s guitars. That being said, those asymmetric patterns still find a way to realign at the hypermetric boundary of 32 eighth notes, or after 4 measures of 4/4 time. That 4/4 time is typically easy to register when the drums are pounding out their straightforward timekeeping (look no further than the band’s two most legendary tracks, “Rational Gaze” and “Bleed”, for examples of this), but being able to identify and lock into the pulse of a track like “Concatenation” is what takes a Meshuggah listening experience from memorable to downright entrancing. It’s tempting to count this song in 5 until it unexpectedly “glitches” and returns to the downbeat; use the guide below to fit the riff into your mind’s 4 / 4 schema.

32 = 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 2

“Stengah”

From Nothing (2002)

Timestamp: 5:00

Nothing signified the arrival of a new era in the Meshuggah canon. Whereas previous albums contained breakneck assaults like “Vanished” or “The Mouth Licking What You’ve Bled”, Nothing’s tracklist was groovier, slower, more patient, and heavy in a fresh and captivating way. That patience extends to the band’s willingness to stave off the realignment of their syncopated rhythmic attack, often drawing out the hypermetric boundary to lengths beyond any in their discography up to that point. “Stengah” features the same opening and closing riff, although the closing riff has been chosen for this example due to the presence of Haake’s beat 3 snare as an anchor. Observe the way the guitars slither around the backbeat more methodically than they did in the tracks above, and feel free to consult the guide if you get lost.

64 = 11 + 11 + 11 + 11 + 11 + 9

“Combustion”

From obZen (2008)

Timestamp: 0:00

“Combustion” is the Meshuggah equivalent of a troll job, as it may actually be their simplest song outside of their first album or Koloss’s “Demiurge”. What makes obZen’s opening track so feared, especially among guitarists, is its deceptive accent pattern that makes it nearly impossible to count without foreknowledge of its sonic illusion. “Combustion” begins with a pickup note, meaning that the initial palm-muted riff you hear at the beginning of the song is notated on the “and” of 4, as opposed to the downbeat of the measure. This requires listeners to locate beat 1 without actually hearing any notes played, at least until Haake’s hi-hat joins in on the fun to identify it on the audience’s radar. You’ll know you’re hearing it correctly if that hi-hat lands on the downbeat and doesn’t sound out of place. Hear “Combustion” upside down, and it’s one of the most dizzying things Meshuggah have ever written; hear it right-side-up, and it’s a groove so deep you can drown in it.

16 = 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 (cymbal + kick on downbeat, snare on offbeat)

“Do Not Look Down”

From Koloss (2012)

Timestamp: 0:25

“Do Not Look Down”’s central concept is, once again, extremely simple, but details how Meshuggah are capable of reinventing themselves in a way listeners have never heard by tweaking just one tiny step of their formula. In this song’s case, the boys neglect to truncate the dominant rhythmic pattern of the song for upwards of 2 minutes, allowing its just-slightly-off sounding riff of 17 eighth notes to continue uninterrupted until locking back in with beat 1 naturally. This trickery continues up until Thordendal’s solo section, and phases in and out of Haake providing a backbeat to keep the listener glued to the song’s pulse. As Meshuggah’s career progressed into the 2010s, more and more of these rules kept getting bent, if not broken entirely, and “Do Not Look Down” stands out as a defining violation of one of their guiding rhythmic principles.

136 = 17 x 8

“Born In Dissonance”

From The Violent Sleep of Reason (2016)

Timestamp: 0:00

“Born In Dissonance” is a sacred text of a family of Meshuggah songs that I refer to as having “stacking” riffs; other examples include obZen’s “Pravus”, Koloss’s “The Demon’s Name is Surveillance”, and Violent Sleep’s title track. Each of these tracks are characterized by a central rhythmic idea; in “Born in Dissonance”’s case, it’s the recognizable “horse gallop” sound hereby typed out by me as “DUH, duh-duh, DUH DUH, duh-duh.” Every time the riff is repeated, that “DUH” will stack, until the riff culminates in three repetitions of “DUH DUH DUH DUH, duh-duh” before looping back to the hypermetric boundary and starting over again. If the counting guides aren’t registering with your brain on a purely numeric front, it is possible to count “stacking” Meshuggah riffs purely based on vibes.

64 = 15 + 15 + 15 + 15 + 4

15 = DUH duh-duh(x1), DUH DUH duh-duh(x1), DUH DUH DUH duh-duh(x1), DUH DUH DUH DUH duh-duh(x3)

4 = DUH duh-duh, DUH DUH duh-duh, DUH

“God He Sees In Mirrors”

From Immutable (2022)

Timestamp: The entire song

“Do Not Look Down” took its sweet time to arrive at its hypermetric boundary, but what if a Meshuggah song never arrived home at all? “God He Sees In Mirrors” sees Meshuggah craft perhaps their craziest riff yet nearly 40 years into their career, all thanks to a stubborn refusal to ever fit the track’s rhythmic puzzle pieces together. Haake’s half-time (and, during the solo, quarter-time) groove is the only thing keeping this musical Jenga tower from undergoing catastrophic collapse, as even unison pauses by the band only lead to re-entry at a different point of the original rhythm. “God He Sees In Mirrors” proudly defies its own standards of creation with its rhythmic complexity, and confidently stamps itself as anomalous within the Meshuggah catalog.

46 = 4 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 4 + 2 + 4 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 2

That should about do it for this week’s installment of SEVEN; I gotta get out of here before the numeric cosmos cave in on themselves.

34:45 // May 19, 2026 // self-released

Portland, OR duo Phosphene have been releasing music at for well over a decade now - Velveteen marks their fifth release, all characteristically rather brief, since 2014. As someone who worked his way methodically through their whole discography in order to have an informed picture for this review, their music is a bit hard to pin down. I don’t mean this specifically in the sense of genre, although there’s a bit of ambiguity around that - all their material orbits around the dream pop label, but with detours here and there into folk-ier or post-punk-y strains. More than anything, there’s just a shapelessness to Phosphene’s sound - if I had to describe it in one word, it might be “pleasant”.

That might feel like damning with faint praise, knocking this act as easy-listening indie and then moving on to more worthy artists as I stroke my mustache and tip my fedora. But I don’t really think that’s right - Phosphene’s music is always pleasant, but it’s also often beautiful in more profound ways, and on occasion rather touching. It’s just not quite so simple to capture the mood they convey - these tunes are rather elusive like that. I think if I had a gripe about their output up to this point, it would be that there’s something, emotionally, that holds me at arm’s length about most of their songs - even 2023’s Transmute, to my ears the group’s best release to date, which was recorded as a pandemic era record with all the intimacy that phrase suggests, excels more as shimmering, unusually bombastic dream pop rather than something that lets me in and makes me feel something.

Latest offering Velveteen seems tailor-made to address that complaint. Perhaps oddly, given this album differentiates itself from its predecessors via a louder and rock-ier approach, this new collection feels more open and personal than ever before. That doesn’t mean the group has lost the essential “pleasant”-ness of previous work, or their sense of somewhat retro songcraft, but you can feel the human heart beneath beating with greater clarity.

I described Velveteen as a bit of a heavier record within the Phosphene canon, but that’s really only half-true. There’s a bit of a dichotomous approach on display here which works better than you might expect, even if the occasional incongruity resulting from the sonic variation is the album’s only major flaw. Basically, tracks like opener “Heaven”, the slightly menacing “Black Ring”, and late album cut “Lupo” blend post-punk with classic rock grit in a louder and more snarling approach than usual, in contrast with other tracks, like the mellow “Warding” or the sublime piano ballad “Too Late”, which showcase peacefully sublime textures that rival the best in the Phosphene catalog. In the back half of the tracklist, instrumental “Dolores” manages to satisfying pinpoint the album’s particular melancholy mood, while closer “Everyone” might not be the finest song present on its own terms, but feels particularly fitting as the one song which fully merges the rock-ier and dream-ier elements of the album’s other pieces.

As is typical for Phosphene, Velveteen is an easy album to like - fairly short, accessible, and, oh yeah, pleasant. To inevitably compare, I’m not sure that it quite measures up to Transmute in quality, but it’s certainly in contention for the act’s finest work, and I find it laudable both for its expansion of their sound and for its ability to cultivate a sense of emotion which has sometimes not been as recognizable for me in the past. It’s a lovely little record which doesn’t demand your attention but still captivates with its simple beauty.

8.0/10

This Week’s New Music

Aja Monet

The Color of Rain (Drink Sum Wtr)

USA | Jazz Poetry

Alela Diane

Who’s Keeping Time? (Fluff & Gravy)

USA | Folk // Americana

Bill Orcutt & Mabe Fratti

Almost Waking (Unheard of Hope)

USA/MEXICO | Experimental

Bleachers

Everyone for Ten Minutes (Dirty Hit)

USA | Indie Pop // Pop Rock

Broommaker

Hourglass (Etxe)

USA | Folk

Burial Clouds

Burn Holy (independent)

USA | Doom Metal // Sludge Metal // Post-Metal

Crash of Rhinos

Logbook (12:01)

UK | Emo // Math Rock // Post-Hardcore

Dark Millennium

Come (Massacre)

GERMANY | Doom Metal // Death Metal // Progressive Metal

Dimmu Borgir

Grand Serpent Rising (Nuclear Blast)

NORWAY | Symphonic Black Metal // Gothic

Downfall of Nur

And the Firmament Will Burn to Quench the Pain of This Earth (Avantgarde)

ARGENTINA | Atmospheric Black Metal

The Early Years

Modern Moonlight (Sonic Cathedral)

UK | Shoegaze // Indie Rock // Neo-Psychedelia

Ed O’Brien

Blue Morpho (Transgressive)

UK | Art Rock

Future Islands

From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth (4AD)

USA | Synthpop // Indietronica // Post-Punk

Gently Tender

This Was Once Fields (TODO)

UK | Indie Rock // Folk Rock

Hammock

The Second Coming Was a Moonrise (independent)

USA | Post-Rock // Ambient

Hands Like Houses

Lotus (Civilians)

AUSTRALIA | Post-Hardcore // Alternative Rock

Harboured

We’re Only the Love That We Lead (Lost Future)

USA | Post-Metal // Progressive Metal // Black Metal

Impure Wilhelmina

Le Sanglot (Season of Mist)

SWITZERLAND | Post-Metal // Post-Hardcore

Marissa Anderson

The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music (label unknown)

USA | Experimental // Folk // Americana

Night Swimming

Melting, Sometimes Bleeding (Venn)

UK | Dream Pop

Phosphene

Velveteen (label unknown)

USA | Dream Pop // Post-Punk // Indie Rock

Simon Joyner

Tough Love (Grapefruit/Sophomore Lounge)

USA | Folk // Experimental // Psychedelic

Stranger Still

We Might Not Tell Everyone This (All-Set!)

CANADA | Experimental // Folk // Jazz

Thomas Dollbaum

Birds of Paradise (Dear Life)

USA | Folk // Alt-Country

Visible Cloaks

Paradessence (RVNG)

USA | Ambient // Progressive Electronic // Post-Minimalism

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week with (spoiler alert) an absolutely stacked list of releases.

Welcome, or welcome back, to Permanent Waves, a weekly-ish expedition into the power pop (and beyond!) of the year 1980.

Docket’s on the lighter side this week: six albums, and on balance maybe one of the more consistently solid batches so far (not to mention the most consistent palette album art-wise, four out of six are mostly black and white). Spoiler alert, no big ZAMNs, but plenty of quality jams nonetheless— Let’s mindset!

D.B. Cooper - Buy American

REALLY good angry-young-man power pop right ‘ere, not by the notorious plane hijacker, but rather a band of five Cali dudes who clearly did not have the foresight to name themselves something with better SEO. This is more or less a perfect illustration of the things I found so lacking in D.L. Byron’s This Day and Age back in January. The lyrics are sharp, the touches of Springsteen-y schmaltz are understated enough to compliment an overall tone of alienated cynicism, and the guitar leads all snarl like the dickens— no namby-pamby girl group jangle here, dudes! Right off the bat, opener “Had Enough” hooked me right the hell in with its broadsides against “pussy little bar bands” and “burned-out hippies sellin’ their middle class plans”, and even though the rest of the album doesn’t quite match it for sheer piss and vinegar, there’s still plenty of rockin’ good times to be had with classic jukebox tuneage such as “Chasin’ Rainbows in the Night”, “Forever Rock ‘n’ Roll”, and “Ram On” (not a Paul McCartney cover, thank goodness). Sorely tempted to give it a ZAMN, but I sense too much unfulfilled potential. Next time around, if frontman Michael Towers comes off like an even bigger asshole, they’ll have it on lock.

VERDICT: NICE

Cold Chisel - East

I wish I could give more props to these Adelaide stadium-rockers, because their fundamentals seem pretty darn solid. To be more specific, something that often itches me about bands in this mold is how slick and factory-made they all seem, like they extracted the dopamine-spiking pop formulas from Boston or Kansas or whoever with no regard for the musical traditions those artists drew on. Cold Chisel doesn’t do this at all! The prominent piano and rollicking guitars keep the band rooted in boozy good times and bluesy hard-rock tradition, and they even bust down a half-decent little rockabilly shuffle on “Rising Sun”. The problem is that their songs are just not that memorable or interesting, and theirs is a style that lives and dies on choruses that take weeks if not months to dislodge from your grey matter. I’m still rooting for Cold Chisel over Journey or Bryan Adams, which is to say, barely.

VERDICT: SKIP

Alberta Hunter - Amtrak Blues

Now here’s a real change of pace! Miss Alberta Hunter, eighty-five years of age in 1980, is a genuine 1920s vaudeville star— Bessie Smith’s classic “Down Hearted Blues?” Hunter wrote the lyrics to the damn thing. She was briefly in a band with Louis fucking Armstrong. I cannot imagine the sort of uncultured swine who wouldn’t automatically respect this woman just for putting in the time on the sort of thankless grind 99% of modern artists couldn’t fathom. On top of that, since most dixieland jazz sounds intrinsically ancient to my ears anyway, Hunter’s wizened voice strikes me as a perfect fit for her style. It’s easy to forget that this stuff used to be downright scandalous, and Hunter, who got her start singing in a bordello, offers a potent reminder of that with both her taste for playful, innuendo-laden lyrics and her effortlessly loose sense of rhythm. Much like with Professor Longhair, a ZAMN feels not just disingenuous but disrespectful here. If there’s one thing I took away from Amtrak Blues, it’s that Alberta Hunter does not need my approval or anyone’s. Mindset of the week: Most folks nowadays / Say old-fashioned ways / Should give place to things that are new / But somehow, I hold / To things that are old / Perhaps it’s an old-fashioned view

VERDICT: NICE

Grace Jones - Warm Leatherette

All the gays go gaga for Grace Jones, but now that disco sucks, what’s a Disco Queen to do? Well, show you don’t need disco to slay, naturally! Warm Leatherette casts an admirably wide stylistic net, largely rooted in reggae but totally unafraid to venture outside Jamaica for a bit of rockin’ new wave. After months of new wave albums with one or two obligatory mid reggae songs each, it’s certainly a refreshing inversion of an established formula, doubly so for a couple of those aforementioned rockers outclassing a good chunk of what’s been coming out of the UK lately. Her rendition of Roxy Music’s “Love is the Drug” is an absolute revelation, a breathless, forceful and altogether sexy dancefloor banger, and Barry Reynolds’ “Bullshit” is the exact right sort of on-the-nose for Jones’ blunt delivery. This bold stylistic reinvention isn’t without growing pains, though: her version of “Private Life” is no less of a drag than the Pretenders’ version, and she’s too stiff to know what to do with Tom Petty’s “Shakedown”.

VERDICT: NICE

Graduate - Acting My Age

And here I was convinced I wouldn’t hear a more diligent power pop pander than Buy American all week! These guys are every bit the slavish My Generation worshippers The Knack are, but come off a lot more charming for it by being actual teenagers themselves, rather than merely dating them. Plus, they like ska, so they’re not total ripoffs— What’s your excuse, Doug Feiger? Frontboy Roland Orzabal musters a worthy exorcism of teen angst on the titular opener (throw ‘em a runner-up mindset of the week for There’s no god, there’s no church in me / There’s an evil that lurks in me / Can’t you see?), one of the singles is a funny little 2-tone number called “Elvis Should Play Ska” (I thought they were singing every shiftless guy at first, heh), and the other single is an annoyingly earwormy little flute riff called “Ever Met A Day”. The remainder offers plenty of competent three-part harmonies and satisfying power-chord riffs, but these kids have a ways to go yet before they’re out from under the shadow of their heroes.

VERDICT: FINE

Al di Meola - Splendido Hotel

I went into this celebrated jazz fusion guitarist’s fourth solo effort bracing for something sort of sterile and nouveau-riche purely based off of the title, and well, I can’t quite say the album defied those expectations, but I definitely liked it more than I thought I would, albeit not by a whole helluva lot. It’s certainly overproduced, full of garish synthesizer bloops and theremins, even fuller of marimbas, and it’s overlong to boot— thank goodness it kept putting me to sleep before the interminable eleven minutes of “Isfahan”! Al di also takes the microphone on album lowlight “I Can Tell”, to mawkish and greasy results. Stick to guitar, bozo! I can’t pretend to be enough of a jazz snob to truly dislike this, though. Those synth bloops generally come across rather cute and fun, “Roller Jubilee” makes nicely breezy use of a four-on-the-floor dance beat, and the aptly-titled “Dinner Music of the Gods” offers up all the shredding fusion wankery you could ever hope for from a guy who rose to prominence in a band called “Return to Forever”. Mostly pleasant but not my thing; I’ll leave it to the experts to weigh the crimes against good jazztaste.

VERDICT: FINE

59:16 // May 15, 2026 // Dead Oceans

Kevin Morby holds the odd and rather unenviable title of my least favorite artist who I listen to a lot. How he achieved this position is a long story, but essentially goes like this. A full decade ago, the folk artist released Singing Saw, which, while far from a perfect record, had a number of incredible songs and an overall atmosphere which scratched a particular itch. Subsequent efforts consistently proved disappointing to me, mostly proving bland and unambitious, with Morby’s lyricism, never exactly his strongest suit, dipping into occasionally actively bad territory. However, utterly mysteriously to my ears, Morby’s career continued to ascend during this period, with him emerging as one of the more acclaimed and popular artists in the indie folk scene. That development meant his new music was always in my face, and I liked his material just enough to be perpetually curious, rather than annoyed, by these constant reminders. My reaction to the three album stretch following Singing Saw proves that, contrary to George W. Bush’s timeless wisdom, you can get fooled again.

That limp and uninteresting era of Morby’s career was broken by the 2022 release of This is a Photograph, an album which was nothing if not ambitious, aiming to create a thematic set of songs documenting, as the Bandcamp description says, “history, trauma and the grand fight against time”. Sounds pretty great, but the results came very near to putting me off from checking any future Morby releases for good - that album contains multiple great songs, but as some grand statement, it’s egregiously lacking, and the lyricism was frequently stunningly poor and unable to articulate anything meaningful. All in all, it was enough to make me think the flaws that Morby had been unable to rise above since Singing Saw would consume his career.

It’s a simple passage on the Bandcamp description (turns out I like reading those) of Morby’s latest, Little Wide Open, which convinced me to give his music one more chance:

As Rachel Kushner writes of Morby in the album’s accompanying essay: “It’s about time, about feeling like he has shifted from nostalgia and the losing game, losing but beautiful, of holding onto the past. He has accepted that time is ceaselessly flowing, and you can’t stop it. Instead, he feels like he’s riding it. He’s riding passenger with time.”

This whole idea resonated pretty deeply with me - not to get all philosophical, but I’m increasingly convinced that finding some way to deal, personally, with the inexorable passage of time and the impermanence of you and everything you love is the great universal struggle, but also somewhat underrepresented in the world of music, perhaps because it’s such a thorny subject. Anyway, I can’t say that reading that restored my faith in Morby’s ability to craft an excellent album, but it at least made me intrigued.

I’m sure glad it did. By every metric, Little Wide Open blows all of Morby’s post-Singing Saw releases out of the water, to an astounding degree. Indeed, I’m almost certain this is a stronger overall record than Singing Saw, as well. In whatever way you want to judge a folk album - lyricism, instrumental arrangements, atmosphere - this is a huge step up, and indeed a masterwork, all the more impressive because this is also Morby’s most sprawling LP. The album is the musical equivalent of a once-hyped NBA lottery pick feeling like a bust for a few years before finally putting it all together and taking the league by storm. As a Blazers fan, Scoot Henderson, looking at you - please pull a Kevin Morby next season.

Clearly well-produced (by The National’s Aaron Dessner) yet feeling organic, these thirteen songs are steeped in the rhythms and culture of Morby’s familiar Midwest (he’s spent much of his life in Kansas City) - these are odes to the simple things in life, populated by recurring references to tornados, roadside churches, fireflies, junebugs, all with an elegiac quality, portraying a picturesque landscape inside a decaying empire as our time inevitably dwindles away. This album contains much of the boldest instrumentation and many of the richest melodies in the discography, but even its frequent mellower moments lean into a rustic dreaminess which compliments the effortless profundity of Morby’s voice, long his best asset.

Despite feeling much less imposing in its aspirations than This is a Photograph, Morby’s latest feels far more rewarding as a journey, even ignoring the clearly superior quality of the songs. Adopting a more reflective lyrical tone, eschewing attempts to make a big statement with simple words, perhaps surprisingly, the messages here come through more strongly, and with much greater depth than its predecessor. Its beautiful yet depressing portrayal of heartland backwaters is powerful - the hollowed-out small towns, the broken promises (“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse” - Springsteen has a line for every occasion), the performatively huge crosses and omnipresent churches, all representing a land and a culture rotting from within, ending up with a living personification of the Seven Deadly Sins in the White House - with a graceful and thoughtful hand, Little Wide Open captures both a personal sense of loss and expands it to a national scope in a way that its predecessor struggled so badly to do. All it took was a softer touch.

I guess that’s not all it took. These songs themselves are very strong - “All Sinners” is absolutely beautiful, as well as dipping more strongly than most into the record’s religious themes, “Natural Disaster” is a sublime epic of a tune, and “Bible Belt” is gentle and flowing in the best way, to name just a few highlights. Not to mention the centerpiece and title track here, which is to my ears the best song Morby’s ever penned - a sprawling, country-tinged meditation that I never want to end. All told, there are thirteen songs here, and any of them would be highlights on any of Morby’s other records released in the last decade. It’s truly inspired stuff.

The album title feels like a winking twist on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Into the Great Wide Open, and if I have no proof of that theory, it does feel like a similar kind of record - comfortable, melodic, rural - even if this one is considerably more melancholic in tone. I mention that because Kevin Morby has always been a traditionalist, his music clearly inspired by the folk and heartland rock greats of the past. This isn’t really any less true here, but the results are more confident, more layered, more transcendent than ever before. Little Wide Open is the first time I’d feel comfortable putting a Morby album alongside the best of one of his idols, but this time around, man does it feel right. All that’s for another day, though. For now, I’ll just say this is one of the finest records to come out in 2026, from an unlikely source. You love to see it!

8.5/10

In my beloved and influential Substack weekly capsule review series PERMANENT WAVES, I talk a lot about “power pop mindset”, but I’ve thus far been reluctant to offer an actual firm definition of the term. See, it’s a bit like pornography: it was invented in the ‘70s to make hippies more sexist, and I know it when I see it.

Sorry, that was just a little joke. My actual working definition of power pop is that it’s a religion that worships the Beatles. More or less. Power pop mindset means moving through the world with the understanding that peace and love and rock and roll did, in fact, change the world, for better or for worse, and very much has the potential to keep changing it, for better or for worse. Music writers have a real bad habit of talking about The Beatles like everyone already knows everything about them, but I think a lot of my fellow under-40s genuinely do not appreciate just how different things were before the Fab Four came along. So think of this SEVEN as a sort of sideways glance at the Beatles mythos, through the lenses of one solo track per Beatle, plus three bonus tracks from some of their closest collaborators.

Ringo Starr - Blue, Turning Grey Over You

Ringo Starr is the easy one. Ringos are a dime a dozen. He can play an instrument (drums), he can carry a tune (even if he can’t quite sing), and he’s happy to be there. Lives to party. You look at Ringo’s body of work within and without the Beatles, and it’s all crowd-pleasers, broad singalong stuff, showtunes through the eyes of a born comedian. He shines in their early films. His first solo record is big-band-y and upbeat and full of old pop standards, and a tidal wave of AM-radio treacle follows in its wake. It’s a cheap buzz, though, and most rock aficionados never really take to it, and his Starr power (HEH) peters out pretty fast as shinier baubles prevail. A Ringo alone is not worth betting big on long-term, unless you have someone a little angstier or more ambitious to play him off of. But, hey, it’s a dime a dozen. Pour one out for all the Ringos— just grist for the mill.

Power pop mindset does not hold many soloists’ careers in high regard (power pop is about a BAND, after all), and Ringo Starr might as well be patient zero for this attitude. At a casual glance, his quite substantial success in the 70s looks an awful lot like an untalented man coasting off a reputation other people mostly built for him. I’m not here to make the case that Ringo is some misunderstood genius— I think most of his albums are mostly mediocre and haven’t aged especially well. But let’s not get too revisionist here: Ringo is not untalented by any stretch of the imagination. Though he may not be much of a frontman, from day one he excelled at playing the everyman (hardly much of an act, given his hardscrabble upbringing). When you’re Beatle-level famous, it’s hard to overstate the mileage you get out of not seeming like kind of a dick; in this regard, John, Paul and George could have stood to learn a thing or two from their drummer. The tracklist for that first solo album was selected from his mother’s favorite songs (aww!), and on “Blue Turning Grey Over You”, he channels a bit of fellow iconic limited vocalist Louis Armstrong into a catchy, very likeable lament for his fleeting pop relevance. Mindset: Well, you used to be so good to me / That’s when I was a novelty / Now you have new thrills in view / Found someone new / Left me blue, turning grey over you

George Harrison - Simply Shady

George Harrison is the kid brother of the group, a mild-mannered string bean of barely twenty when he’s suddenly one of the most famous guitarists alive. Early on, an unkind observer might dare to call him the weak link; he’s still shaking off the last of those teenage scale exercises on his Please Please Me solos. He’s their resident music nerd early on, too, devouring American folk and soul before falling head-over-heels for Hindustani classical. Hearing Harrison coming into his own as a man and musician, almost in real-time, is one of the most profound joys of the Beatles’ unfolding discography— even as he begins to bristle against his own celebrity. His first solo release is a film score full of sitars, and despite his ardent fans’ insistence that he never got his proper due in the band, his career after their 1970 break-up proves frustratingly mercurial, often marred by bitterness and indifference. A band led by a George is likely unreliable, lacking in attention-seeking instincts, but the people will love him for it— find a way to light a fire under him, and you could very well make off with a pocketful of lasting cult classics, even if nothing properly sets the charts ablaze. Solo, though? Forget it, if he doesn’t burn out in five years he’ll probably get bored or go join the Falun Gong or some shit. Georges are not exactly a force to be reckoned with until they get personal cassette recorders in the 80s.

The knocks on solo George are a notch less straightforward than the knocks on solo Ringo, but only by a notch. He’s not an especially strong singer (especially on Dark Horse where he’s recovering from a nasty bout of coke-and-cigs-induced laryngitis), and his albums tend to prioritize vibes over per se songwriting, which is a tough row to hoe given his vibes throughout most of the 70s could politely be called “troubled”. However fervently he threw himself into seeking a higher holy truth, George remained a creature of earthly attachments: it genuinely bothered him a lot that John and especially Paul didn’t think his songs deserved equal real estate on a Beatles album, and it tore him apart when his drug use and infidelity cost him the love of his life, Pattie Boyd. Lucky thing, then, that he was always the sort of artist who benefitted greatly from a dark night of the soul. He described “Simply Shady” as “what happens to naughty boys in the music business”, putting it rather mildly in classic George fashion. The song, four and a half minutes of lilting, downbeat folk-pop, ruminates on vice, madness and heartache before offering one of George’s most piercing summations of his complicated feelings on fame. Mindset: The action that I’ve started / Sometime I’ll have to face / My influence in motion / Rebounding back through space

John Lennon - Mind Games

John Lennon is the acid wit, the iconoclast, the Beatles’ political conscience and experimental edge. Your classic tortured artiste: a rough childhood defined by an absent father and a mother that died suddenly as he was finishing high school, severe problems with drinking and hard drugs that impaired his creative drive for much of his career, and a violent temper that clashed with his self-styled intellectual-peacenik image. His first solo record is an abstract sound collage made with the performance artist he left his first wife for, featuring his fully nude body on the cover. Dealing with a John from the business end is playing on hardcore mode. Guys like him are nothing but big ideas and chips on shoulders, and they can’t stand corporate suits as a rule, but if you find a halfway sensible one with an ounce of originality, you’ve got the makings of a voice of a generation.

It would be very MindsetTM to use John’s disillusionment with The Beatles as synecdoche for the counterculture’s disillusionment with the free-love sixties, but it would also be quite misleading. If anything, John’s disillusionment was rooted in an unwavering devotion to that sixties spirit, and what he saw as his bandmates’ abandonment of that spirit. The man was openly cynical about cynicism, and in 1973 that was a recipe for a prickly rapport with a music press that respected his influence but saw his style of activism as passé and ineffectual. Passé, I’ll concede: ‘73 is an incredibly fertile year for rock, the hot new artists on the scene are gritty realists like the New York Dolls and Bruce Springsteen, and John’s new album Mind Games is about as sloganeer-y as sloganeering gets (From “Bring on the Lucie”: Stop the killing now / do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now). He spends another track apologizing directly to his estranged wife for vague “hurt” and “pain”. Fresh off the controversy of “Woman is the Gamer of the World” (think about it), it’s never been easier to write him off as a washed-up, self-absorbed hypocrite. Ineffectual, though? Well, the anthemic title track struck enough of a chord to garner modest chart success and kind (or at least conciliatory) words from critics. The peeple couldn’t hate it, because no matter how many times we had heard John say “all you need is love”, he could tell we still didn’t quite get it. His revolution of the inner world remained (and remains) unfinished. Mindset: So keep on playing those mind games together / Doing the ritual dance in the sun / Millions of mind guerrillas / Putting their soul power to the karmic wheel / Keep on playing those mind games forever / Raising the spirit of peace and love, love / I want you to make love, not war / I know you’ve heard it before

Paul McCartney - About You

Finally, there’s Paul McCartney. The most stable element of the four in isolation, he takes to the limelight like a fish to water, and shepherds the band through their turbulent final years, as John spirals into heroin addiction, and barbiturates and alcohol claim manager Brian Epstein. His boyish good looks and monstrous appetite for pastiche both serve him well. Naysayers see a preening egomaniac and a tyrannical sellout who helped split up the band with petty money-grubbing; legions of fans see the very model of a rock star, a once-in-a-generation musical polymath responsible for the sterling popular touch of the best-selling band of all time. His first solo album is a ramshackle collection of ditties he throws together in his kitchen as the band breaks up, largely scorned on release but growing in prestige somewhat as his new band Wings garners strong record sales and successful tours across the next decade. It should be obvious why you’d want a Paul in your roster, but beware his love: he’ll make you work for him and like it, and he’s a whole lot weirder than he lets on.

Every Beatles fan has their favorite, and my favorite is Paul, which means you can’t fully trust anything I say here, both because I am biased and because Paul stans are sneaky motherfuckers at heart. For example, the first album with his name on the cover is technically a film score that he didn’t even perform on or write most of, and his tsundere rival John’s actual solo debut (as in, credited to just John Lennon) is technically a deeply flawed yet often moving piece of existential pop art inspired by primal scream therapy! See, you only have to bend the truth ever so slightly to make Paul look like the band’s protagonist, or if you want to be harsh, an audience-insert. The other three are all very distinct and strong personalities– John the sardonic activist, George the moody introvert, Ringo the jocular party animal– but Paul’s type is considerably more elusive. He’s undeniably a workaholic, but also perpetually takes pains to come off nonchalant and unburdened by the pressures of celebrity. He built his reputation on songs about the dozens of girls he was cheating on Jane Asher with, only to emerge from his band’s demise as rock’s most devoted family man, forming Wings with his wife Linda and even taking his young children on tour with him. He’s a savant and autodidact who learned guitar, bass, piano, and drums all by ear, and also a strong contender for the laziest classic rocker of the 80s (a very crowded field). He’s worked tirelessly to preserve the history of The Beatles, and nearly as tirelessly to tweak every tiny little thing he can get away with in a way that makes him look better. That’s a lot of contradictions to capture with one song! “About You”, the only song of this SEVEN not from the early-mid SEVENties, is nominally about Paul’s new fiancée Heather, but he still clearly has Linda on his mind three years after her tragic passing, as well as his old bandmate George, lost to a short battle with lung cancer the same month Driving Rain was released. The strident rocker, replete with sledgehammering drums courtesy of Abe Laboriel Jr., tries to brute-force its way through grief to some approximation of enlightenment. The Paul method in miniature, perhaps; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? Mindset: When did you teach me to fly through the air? / Sooner or later, we all will be there / I read the headlines, and now I can swear it’s true / And they said it about you

Billy Preston - Outa-Space

It probably says something a bit ugly about the Beatles mythos that the title of “fifth Beatle” is more often applied to their manager or their producer than to the one musician who came closest to being an actual fifth member of the band (John wanted him to join, Paul quickly shot the idea down). Generously, though, the man behind the playful Fender Rhodes solo on “Get Back” deserves better than to be just an accessory to the Beatles story: his resume is full of big, big names from Sam Cooke to Whitney Houston to The Rolling Stones, and his solo work stands as a testament to the musical and personal warmth that made him such an effective collaborator. His Grammy-winning 1972 hit single “Outa-Space” is a rollicking instrumental jam session where Preston runs a clavinet through a wah-wah for a loose, space-age update on the immortal sound of Booker T and the MG’s. Mindset: running a clavinet through a fuckin’ wah-wah

Yoko Ono - What A Bastard the World Is

Perhaps even more so than John himself, his second wife Yoko Ono is a complicated, often frustrating personality, deeply shaped by the traumas of postwar Japan and freed, in degrees, by the boundless possibility of the avant-garde. For how often she’s been accused of enabling her third husband’s worst impulses, Yoko’s early work as a recording artist often explicitly strove to confront him with his failings and challenge him to be a better man. As the old saying goes, nobody really knows what goes on in a marriage, but the image of John and Yoko, two messy sinful humans who attempted to sort through their shit together because they loved each other, deliberate equals in a world that demanded male dominance, proudly codependent in an increasingly atomized and isolated society, remains aspirational to many for good reason. Much of Yoko’s ambitious 1973 pop move Approximately Infinite Universe, like Mind Games, is contextualized by arguably the most turbulent period of their relationship. “What A Bastard The World Is” starts off cold, accusatory, wrathful, a spitting image of the hurt housewife up late waiting for her unfaithful man. In the end, though, Yoko refuses to let herself off the hook for the part she plays in the sorry scene, backing away regretfully from a rage she recognizes as unproductive . Mindset: Are you listening, you jerk, you pig, you bastard / You scum of the earth, you good-for-nothing, are you listening? / Oh, don’t go, don’t go / Please, don’t go / I didn’t mean it, I’m just in pain / I’m sorry, I’m sorry

Badfinger - Come and Get It

Right as the Fab Four began to feud and fracture, their fledgling Apple Corps record label signed an up-and-coming bar band from Wales called The Iveys, led by one Pete Ham, a sensitive young rocker with a penchant for covering Beatles hits. Though Apple Corps was such an administrative disaster that The Ivey’s sole album, 1969’s Maybe Tomorrow, only made it to stores in the former axis powers, the men running the label quickly took a shine to Ham and his band. After the album naturally failed to turn a profit, Paul enlisted the Iveys to record a few songs for a film he had already agreed to provide music for, including one of his own compositions (tempering that shrewdness with a little beneficence— classic Paul). One name change later, and Badfinger’s “Come and Get It” was climbing the charts, setting the stage for one of power pop’s earliest and greatest tragedies. The Beatles clearly saw Badfinger as their heirs apparent, but the lads just had too much else on their plate to be the mentors the band needed. They could never quite progress past imitating their idols, and after they left Apple in ‘73, their crooked manager started stealing almost every penny the band earned for himself, eventually driving poor Pete to hang himself in his garage. In a better world, we might have seen a Badfinger that blossomed into a proper evolution of the Beatles sound. In the world we got, they were merely the first true gold standard for Beatles imitators— and the sound kept on evolving regardless. Mindset: If you want it, any time, I can give it / But you’d better hurry, ‘cause it may not last / Did I hear you say that there must be a catch? / Will you walk away from a fool and his money?

Quick-fire Roundup is our chance to highlight a few of the albums we’ve been digging from the past month that we may not have had the time or energy to pump out full essays for. These releases nevertheless deserve a gold star and a spot on the podium.

Tigercub – Nets to Catch the Wind
42:30 // April 10th, 2026 // Loosegroove

Now four albums deep, Tigercub seem to have exhausted any tricks up their sleeve—the Brighton-based trio spend this latest LP continuing to refine their established sweet spot, a riff- and melody-forward strand of alternative rock that recalls the scrappy finesse of first-wave post-grunge (that is to say, “the good stuff”) and the sickly sweet melodrama of radio rock’s turn-of-century zeitgeist. Equal parts Queens of the Stone Age worship and Muse worship, originality has never been the band’s strong suit, but their yield on that formula packs a mightier wallop and a stickier residue than those backhanded compliments would suggest. Every track on Nets... reaps the benefits of Tigercub devoting themselves to this gothic-tinged, hard-edged brooding; the one trick they perform has little competition in 2026, and they occupy the ultra-accessible void as splendidly as ever. (7.0/10)

- Zack Lorenzen

Squarepusher – Kammerkonzert
62:44 // April 10th, 2026 // Warp Records

When I first hit play on Kammerkonzert, I was immediately struck by the impression that Thomas Jenkinson was once again on a Stockhausen spree. This was a mistake brought about by a timely gurgle from my dishwasher. It was not my last mistake. I also had the idea that this konzert of Squarepusher’s was performed with the aid of a modest number of classical musicians, just enough to fit in a generously sized room that may or may not contain both a pot and a maid. No, no! Details regarding Kammerkonzert’s production are scarce, but the only performer listed is the brisk bassist himself. Sometimes it feels as if this is the space Jenkinson wants us to exist in — a spare, modern chamber where we eagerly await his breaking of wind and do our best to parse the floating molecules for signs of his inherent genius.

While I can’t clear the air for you, I can tell you that it only takes about four sniffs to catch the scent. Through the first few tracks, our academic maestro’s compare/contrast variables are set to work: “K1 Advance” hits you with the natural sounding chamber music, all fleeting melodicism and arrangements that stop/start/expand/contract; “K2 Central” throws a quickfire staccato bassline down that refuses to break its bounds beyond shifting its pattern around the fretboard while moody horns, wind instruments and whathaveyous expand the space with measured breaths, setting up a distinct clash of styles within the composition; “K3 Diligence”’s throaty motif turns the elegance of the arrangements into something of a crude joke, even for all the surrounding musicianship; “K4 Fairlands” finally pushes all the pieces towards something resembling IDM, programmed linear drums and all.

Kammerkonzert revels in this clash of styles, in the battle between the synthetic and the intimate, the natural and the unnatural, and the perceived “reality” of the music itself. Sound heady? Well, it’s Squarepusher innit. This Kammer was always going to be ostentatious, brilliant, ridiculous, and stuffy. For my part, I’m much more engaged with the ambition on display here than I was with Dostrotime’s return to Squarepusher’s more obvious strengths. You might be too, but you’ll have to poke your nose in to find out. (7.5/10)

- Milo Ruggles

Necroccultus - The Afterdeath Blackness
32:34 // April 28th, 2026 // Terror From Hell

The level of Necroccultus’ online presence is congruent with the number of fucks they give about trends. I could end this blurb right here, because that’s literally everything you need to know about them, but seeing as The Afterdeath Blackness is the Mexican troupe’s second full-length since their formation in, checks dust-crusted almanac, 2003, a few words of praise are in order.

These guys put the FFS in riffs, which is to say there’s a single layer to their craft and that layer is unalloyed death metal with a focus on foursquare chord progressions. Live by the four bars, die by the four bars. With a concept that simple, the songs naturally need to deliver in the neck-moving department, and boy, do they ever! “Unburied Hellish Presences” alone mops the floor with hundreds of releases from the ‘os’ panoply I’ve put myself through over the past five years, and that’s not even the album’s strongest composition. Or maybe it is. It’s hard to tell when every single track is this consummate in both concept and execution. I could animadvert the spoken-growl kitsch triflingly adulterating the opener and closing title track, but, honestly, what’s the point? If you are old, feel old, or just long for something that sounds old and coincidentally stands on par with the old masters, you’ll dig this. (8.0/10)

- Nex

Sarin - The World Goes on Without You
27:41 // April 3rd, 2026 // Phage Tapes

While I’d generally classify the output of Chicago four-piece Sarin as a mishmash of black-deathened metalcore and powerviolence, plastering this album with tags would do nothing but lead to belied expectations. The World Goes on Without You is chaotic without getting math-y, dark without coming off as a theatrical act, and just non-metallic enough to dodge Hugh’s ‘armpit music’ label. Sample-ridden noise collages serve as interludes, mercifully granting the listener a chance to gasp for air (inconveniently filled with O-Isopropyl methylphosphonofluoridate) between the recurring chokeholds exerted by the perennially gnarled main pieces. Experienced front to back, this one proves to be a briar path, but ultimately rewards the obstinate with a rather original conglomeration of synth-accompanied core inflections, apoplectic blasts, and dissosludge-bordering, lumbering motifs. I prefer this to Converge’s latest in any case. (7.0/10)

- Nex

TOMORA - Come Closer
55:23 // April 17th, 2026 // Fontana Records

TOMORA have arrived. A clever(?) portmanteau of The Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands and alt-pop queen AURORA, this collaboration thankfully goes far deeper than simply slapping two halves of their sounds together. Alternately low-key and high-spirited, Come Closer churns through EDM genres like a paddleboat, and should by all means feel scattershot, but thanks to excellent production and performances, it all melds into a haunted little package. That eeriness stems largely from AURORA’s arresting vocals—whether shouted or murmured, manic or measured, they prove just as malleable as Rowlands’ shapeshifting beats. The way her voice flits around the hi-hats on highlight “I Drink the Light” is sublime, and she effortlessly wrings pathos from cuts like “My Baby” and “The Thing.” But the biggest winner here is the triumphant dance-pop rush of “Somewhere Else.” Its relative polish is the clearest indicator of where this duo’s heart truly lies, and its sheer effortlessness signals that TOMORA won’t likely be a one-off. Old-school meets new talent, and the results are more than just a grab bag of ’90s aestheticism—it’s the real thing. (8.0/10)

- A.R.O.

Angelo de Augustine – Angel in Plainclothes
34:01 // April 24th, 2026 // Asthmatic Kitty

Prevailing after a multi-year struggle to rewire his nervous system, Angelo de Augustine could be forgiven for indulging in some self-help singalongs. Angel in Plainclothes is resolutely not that type of album, however; the singer-songwriter’s fifth LP rarely gleans epiphanies from his breakdown directly, opting to package any newfound clarity through peripheral glimpses and tricks of the light. Though outside help played a role in the album’s production—a change of pace barring basically all but his 2021 collaborative LP with labelmate Sufjan Stevens—the gorgeous songwriting remains de Augustine’s foremost musical objective and his most consistently remarkable attribute. Comparisons to other indie folk legends like Nick Drake, Elliott Smith (especially the dirge-like, haunted “Empty Shell” and “Mirror Mirror”), or Stevens himself are no longer just a marketable perk, but an exorcised frustration: in reclaiming his own well-being, de Augustine shies away from staking his self-worth on his art’s success, making peace with the fragility of life as a broader experience. Two birds, one stone—these chamber-backed arrangements invoke precisely the holy, humbled awe his penmanship has strived for his whole career. (8.0/10)

- Zack Lorenzen

Angine de Poitrine – Vol. II
36:54 // April 3rd, 2026 // ATO

Any of you who’ve fallen down the Angine de Poitrine rabbit hole may be surprised that their latest release, Vol. II, is eligible for this month’s edition of Quick-fire Roundup. Their viral KEXP session first dropped back in February, and the whole gist of their performance—the alien, polka-dot costumes, the prodigious looping, the microtonal instrumentation—took indie music discourse by storm in the months since, offering every financially-incentivized purveyor of this sort of art (i.e. YouTube reactor channels, love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re here to stay) a rare chance to genuinely get flummoxed by content for once in their lives.

By the time I finally checked out that set (which you should admittedly do ASAP if you haven’t already), newer clickbait had already begun to come along. A shame, too, because while Angine de Poitrine sacrifices some of their charm as a quantized, purely auditory experience, stripping away the visual element of their act isn’t even close to a deal-breaker. The six tracks on this project—three carried over from their public debut in that aforementioned set—all groove hard and contain playful multitudes. Listeners predisposed to progressive rock in any of its forms would be remiss to overlook Khn and Klek’s wild ride just because it broke containment. I’d argue no idiosyncratic power duo has ever earned the attention more. (8.0/10)

- Zack Lorenzen

Knotfall - Shoreline
42:08 // April 17, 2026 // Candlepin

Philadelphia’s Knotfall absolutely impress with their debut LP Shoreline - in most respects, it feels like the work of a veteran band operating at the peak of their game. The album is absolutely representative of the indie underground’s recent wave of emo/shoegaze/slowcore-merging acts, but also spends plenty of bandwidth dipping into a much wider range of styles, from electronic tinkering to sudden twists into crushing doom textures. You can’t knock the ambition, but I’d argue Shoreline is at its best when delivering what is clearly the band’s bread-and-butter, illustrated clearly by the mid-album duo of the placid “Endlessly” and the rather eerie “Halloween”. The latter’s attempt at catharsis, as the repeated chorus turns more and more into screaming, might not be very original, but it’s sure effective. All told, there are undoubtedly things for Knotfall to work on going forward, but Shoreline might still be my favorite debut of the year. (8.0/10)

- Sunnyvale

Secrets Kept - III
09:07 // April 19th, 2026 // Speed Ritual

What drives an artist to start forty-six different solo projects? Who in their right mind starts and/or joins eighty-four bands? The answer to both of those questions is of course Jared Moran, and both numbers will likely be outdated this time next week. Take a peek at the insurmountable wall of text that is his M-A entry, then reserve your next three vacations for a full discog run (at sixteen hours of listening per day; alternatively, budget one hour per day for the next year).

Just to give you a picture of what we’re dealing with here, the secret ultimate final boss of database contributors has released two Thousand Cuts EPs, two Loaded Dice EPs, three Morenew newnew new EPs, a new Great Depression EP, and this new Secrets Kept EP in April alone. Mr. Moran being the DIY buff that he is, handling everything from (real) drums to vocals to production himself, a certain amount of overlap between all these aliases is to be expected, and not every release hits, but you can’t deny the pure devotion behind it all.

On III, Jared does Moran things. The end.

Unintelligible bafflegab to some, virtuoso handiwork to others, this set of what I can only assume are the man’s idea of jam sessions serves as a perfect sampling of his ability to let his fingers flow freely across the fretboards and hit the drumheads with somnambulistic precision. As with most of his solo work, it’s very much a ‘take it or leave it’ situation. I, for one, take it.

In all likelihood, J.M. will have released a new EP by the time this column gets published, no /s. Whatever new geopolitical cruelty surfaces tomorrow, I’ll rest easy knowing that somewhere in Mississippi an incomprehensibly gifted man excessively passionate about metal sits in front of a literal wall of cabinets and amps, recording another thirty tracks of unmediated artistic effusion to make the world a madder place.

Moran-Stephens-Walter collab when? (7.0/10)

- Nex

Want even more? Check out our full-length reviews for these other April releases:

This Week’s New Music

The All-American Rejects

Sandbox (Slick Shoes)

USA | Pop Rock // Pop-Punk

Atavistia

Old Gods Awaken (Blood Blast)

CANADA | Melodic Death Metal // Folk Metal

Bleary

Little Brain (YK)

USA | Dream Pop

Crow and Gazelle

Truth Be Told (label unknown)

USA | Americana // Folk // Rock

Desolus

Dwellers of the Twilight Void (Hells Headbangers)

USA | Thrash Metal

Drake

Iceman (OVO/Republic)

CANADA | Hip-Hop // R&B // Pop

Dua Saleh

Of Earth & Wires (Ghostly International)

USA | R&B // Pop

Eluvium

Virga III (Temporary Residence)

USA | Ambient // Drone // Progressive Electronic

Fake Dust

Decrepitizing Din of the Cerebral Psyopticon (Iron Lung)

USA | Grindcore

The Field

Now You Exist (Studio Barnhus)

GERMANY | Techno // Minimal // House

For Breakfast

Longer Than Spring (independent)

UK | Art Rock // Dream Pop // Post-Rock

Genesis Owusu

Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge (Ourness)

AUSTRALIA | Hip-Hop // Soul

Junon

The Golden Citadel of the Astral Sphere (I, Voidhanger)

GERMANY | Black Metal // Psychedelic

Kevin Morby

Little Wide Open (Dead Oceans)

USA | Indie Folk

Martyna Basta

Winged in Collapse (7K)

POLAND | Ambient // Electroacoustic // Experimental

New Idea Society

Fire on the Hill (Relapse)

USA | Indie Rock

Nocturnal Reveries

Song of the Forest (Naturmacht)

FINLAND | Atmospheric Black Metal // Folk Metal

Orphan Donor

Ailments (Zegema Beach)

USA | Grind // Hardcore // Sludge Metal

Periphery

A Pale White Dot (3DOT)

USA | Djent // Progressive Metal // Metalcore

Peter Frampton

Carry the Light (UMe)

USA | Pop Rock // Blues Rock

Port Noir

The Dark We Keep (Inside Out)

SWEDEN | Alternative Rock // Progressive Metal

Rostam

American Stories (Matsor Projects)

USA | Indie Pop

Ryan Bingham

They Call Us the Lucky Ones (Bingham Recording Co.)

USA | Country // Americana

Shakey Graves

Fondness, Etc. (Secret Identity)

USA | Indie Folk // Americana

Spencer Krug

Same Fangs (Pronounced Kroog)

CANADA | Indie Pop // Indie Rock

Suss

Counting Sunsets (Northern Spy)

USA | Ambient Americana

Tamikrest

Assikel (Glitterbeat)

MALI | Tishoumaren // Blues // Psychedelic

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week!

73:30 // May 8, 2026 // Prophecy

There are a number of reasons it’s quite surprising Stack Interflow in Corpse Pile Interface is a contender for my favorite album yet in 2026. First off, it’s avant-garde black metal, a style which, with rare exceptions like Dodheimsgard’s Black Medium Current, I’ve rarely fallen for. Secondly, this album’s tone is decidedly goofy, which isn’t typically my preference. And finally, the runtime stretches well over an hour, a duration which usually doesn’t work in a record’s favor for me.

Regardless, A Forest of Stars’ latest LP simply works. This might be less unexpected than it appears - while I’ve not previously been a full-blown fan of this odd British band, I have heard several of their other works and enjoyed them, if never to the point of frequent revisitations. Still, Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface feels different - it entranced me upon first listen, and further spins have only made me more convinced that it’s a weird, weird, masterpiece.

The repetition of the word “weird” is not a mistake. The bizarre album title feels fitting - there are occasional black metal passages here which will probably feel rather “conventional” to listeners familiar with extreme underground music, but most of the album is far from the genre, dipping instead into nightmarish industrial segments, meandering psychedelia, and absolutely gorgeous violin-led prog. Indeed, the sheer beauty and repulsive ugliness on display, and the comfortable way in which the band maneuvers back and forth, is quite magical. The lyrics, too, at least what I can understand, teeter between espousing high-minded philosophy and spewing the lowest forms of vulgarity, mostly delivered in an unhinged ranting delivery (by the male vocalist, the female vocalist has a lovely voice and provides an interesting counterpoint).

All this swirling strangeness is unnerving, and it’s fair to say that A Forest of Stars don’t need typical extreme metal invocations of Satan or the slaughter of innocents ten times per minute (got ‘em!) in order to make their music feel quite vile. But creeping out the listener isn’t the album’s greatest strength - that would be such a long album managing to be so engaging throughout. These six tracks (all over nine minutes in length) flow so well, both in their internal structures and into one another, and even as such sonic territory is covered, there’s rarely any jarring transitions. Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface is grotesque, it’s sublime, it makes me laugh, it makes me squirm - against all odds, it might be my album of the year.

9.0/10

49:38 // May 1, 2026 // Polyvinyl

It’s highly doubtful that American Football will ever truly escape the long shadow cast by their iconic debut album, but if they’re ever going to, LP4 lays out a convincing template. With its blood and/or forest fire-tinted artwork advertising a bleaker outlook than ever, the Midwest emo of yesteryear supplanted by post-rock utilizing patient builds and somber riffs, and an immersive sense of atmosphere, this feels like a revitalized band taking on a form we’ve never heard before. Better yet, this style fits the musicians’ talents nicely - of particular note, Steve Lamos’ drumming is vital here, both ear-grabbing and bringing cohesion to the swaying, swelling soundscapes, and Mike Kinsella’s vocals, always rather one-note and perhaps also strained with the advancing years, fit in with the instrumentals perfectly, all the while providing an aching emotional gravitas.

The formula is well-crafted, there’s no question. Even better, though, most of these songs are top-notch, and this is pretty clearly the strongest collection the band’s put out since the turn of the millennium. “No Feeling” flows along steadily, but its mix of chiming beauty and brooding tension suggests that, contrary to the title, you’ll feel something. “Bad Moons” is dark and provides a lyrical gut punch while delivering an epic feel which other tracks are content to skirt. In the album’s latter half, meanwhile, “Desdemona” is a stunner which took me longer to appreciate, its gorgeousness unveiling slowly upon repeat listens.

While the previous paragraph cites three personal highlight tracks, LP4’s overarching strength is its cohesiveness,reliably pulling the listener into its delicate shroud of autumnal decay and wallowing sense of melancholic beauty. Some songs stand out more than others, and there are occasional transcendent moments - Kinsella’s heartbreaking delivery of the lines “Your daughter’s not dead, she’s just asleep, for hours on end, for days, forever, she dreams” against the most heavenly musical backdrop this side of the pearly gates comes to mind - but what you’ll most remember about this album after one listen or ten is its lush and enveloping nature. LP4 is beautiful, and sad, and delivers those attributes in a notably different way than its iconic predecessor. Who can ask for more?

8.0/10

Welcome, or welcome back, to Permanent Waves, a weekly-ish expedition into the power pop (and beyond!) of the year 1980.

Got a nice thicc docket for y’all this week: nine albums running a wide gamut from metal to folk to jazz-funk to postpunk! There’s a little something for everyone, but only the cream of the panderin’ crop shall be blessed by the ZAMN— let’s mindset!

Alice Cooper - Flush the Fashion

To me, the fundamental fact of Vincent D. Furnier is that he’s ambitious beyond his means. That can be easy to miss, because his instincts for carnal provocation are so sharp– as the man himself puts it, he’s “into fun, sex, death, and money”– but ever since he broke up his old band and jacked their name for himself, he’s also been striving to refashion himself as a sort of hard-rock Andrew Lloyd Webber. Even if the results are consistently interesting, I’d be hard-pressed to call much of it truly great (though sobriety and Bernie Taupin both seemingly did a lot of good for 1978’s From the Inside). Anyway, now he’s on the blow and trying his hand at new wave, I guess… So much for flushing the fashion! The migraine haver in my life got a kick out of “Aspirin Damage” at least, but the carnal provocations are in short enough supply to make this basically worthless to any dyed-in-the-wool fan. His heart just doesn’t seem to be in aping Devo and The Cars; maybe he should have written another rock opera around that song about clones instead.

VERDICT: SKIP

Australian Crawl - The Boys Light Up

This Vic pub band loves their sarcastic lyrics about the idle rich, which I’m always game for, but their tongues are too firmly in cheek to give ‘em the lashing they really deserve; maybe the fact that the idle rich are their primary audience has something to do with it. They’re still young, and easy on the ears besides, so I’m optimistic that playing for a few crowds of proper blue-collars will get it through their skulls that this shit ain’t cute. At the very least, I hope it’ll teach them that a little guitar fuzz never hurt anyone. Best track: “Downhearted”, the tougher, boozier take on Steely Dan you never knew you needed.

VERDICT: FINE

Brats - 1980

If Shakin’ Street embodies the righteous, innocent ego of rawk and roll in the AC/DC mold, This Danish quartet embodies rawk’s hyperactive, impudent id— They play heavy metal like it’s punk, which is to say sloppily, simply, and often (but not often enough) breathlessly fast. Without checking, I’m guessing they’re rather serious and talented students of the Ramones, and rather distracted and juvenile, though no less earnest, students of Judas Priest (and their moms still won’t let them listen to Motorhead). That combination very much has its charms, the problem is just that the charms fly by, while everything else plods. Gimme a whole A-side of crackerjack hooky headbangers like “Punk Fashion”, “Fuel”, and “Accepted”, and I’ll be so thrilled they can throw a few slow ones on side B and I’ll even convince myself to like ‘em. Mindset of the week: You believe in fashion / Yeah, that is your passion / Punk in mass production / Fashion is destruction / Regiment the masses / They’re wearing punk sunglasses

VERDICT: NICE

The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms

These New Jersey suburbanites kick off their careers as recording artists already steeped to the tits in mindset, signed with Stiff Records after The Village Voice called them “The best underground band in New York”. Indeed, Crazy Rhythms is exactly the kind of music that would rule the airwaves if people who write for The Village Voice or know what Stiff Records is had their way about it. As things stand, they’re too good for the radio. Hell, they’re too good for the underground, too. They cite the Beatles and the Velvets both as influences, and sure, it comes across, but that’s every other band on the planet these days. The more fruitful comparisons are with The Modern Lovers, or Television— same askew angst, same jittery way with hooks, same trenchantly cool uncoolness. They play tighter than either, too, which counts for a lot in my book. The album title says it all, really. Just take a listen to “Forces at Work”, the fucker rocks such a commandingly precise groove that its seven minutes flies by in what feels like three. Their “Me and My Monkey” cover? Downright funky, yet somehow uncannily, engrossingly machinelike at the same time. All the hats off to drummer Tony Fier (fire? fear?) for locking the hell in, hats off to the other three for keeping pace with him.

VERDICT: ZAMN

Grateful Dead - Go to Heaven

I’ve always preferred the Allman Brothers for meandering hippie white-blues jams, and the Dead are such a live band anyway that they’ve outright admitted that this is little more than a contractual obligation, so, y’know, what does it even matter that I don’t really like it, right? Well, for one, there’s “Feel Like A Stranger”, a lugubrious dance track that confirms every bad vibe coming off that eyesore of an album cover. Maybe they’re just too established and too successful to make convincing counterculture at this point, but it’s a lot more depressing that they aren’t even trying. “Easy to Love You” sounds like the fucking Eagles. You don’t need to be a deadhead to know that nobody was asking for this, but you might need to be on a helluva lot of acid to not realize how generic their mellow rootsy vibes have gotten.

VERDICT: SKIP

Emmylou Harris - Roses in the Snow

Not bad, just a little bit dull. Emmylou’s voice is almost as featureless as it is limber, and an album with as much of a bluegrass twang to it as Ross in the Snow calls for a little more down-home grit than she can quite muster. She has the good sense to frontload it with two bangers, rendering the title track adorably and timelessly, and “Wayfaring Stranger” hauntingly and genrelessly. Most of the rest is a few shades too easy-listening for my taste, and the star-studded guest list comes and goes without much ado (Hey, Johnny Cash on “Jordan”, though!). Hot take for the week: “The Boxer” was never all that great of a lyric, and all Emmylou can do for it is come by kitsch a notch more honestly than Paul Simon.

VERDICT: FINE

George Duke - A Brazilian Love Affair

On his fourteenth(!) studio album, this decorated fusion keyboardist sounds like he’s cashing checks from the biggest names in the biz, which he is. As far as I’m concerned, the star attractions here are the evocatively-titled samba frenzy “Up From the Sea It Arose and Ate Rio in One Swift Bite”, and the poppin’ bassline on the opening title track. A lot of it is kind of too slick and expensive-sounding for me to feel too strongly about it, and that Brazilian influence is too often reined-in on merely competent sex-jam smooth jazz like “I Need You Now” or “Love Reborn”. It’s pretty and fun, though! Saved from FINE tier by Roland Bautista’s molten-hot guitar leads.

VERDICT: NICE

Laraaji - Ambient 3: Day of Radiance

Brian Eno only produced this one, but his work has already sort of dispensed with the primacy of performance in recorded music, hasn’t it? Maybe so, maybe so. What it hasn’t dispensed with by a long shot is the primacy of collaboration, and one of his finest collaborators yet is a man named Edward “Laraaji” Gordon, who plays a harp/lute thing called a zither that Wikipedia indicates is popular around the Alps. Together, they have created a miraculous 20-minute wonderland of cascading, interlocking melodies and rhythms called “The Dance” and 26 minutes of perfectly pleasant and relaxing Eno-by-numbers pink air called “Meditation”. Write off side B as new age yoga studio filler if you must, but side A makes the blissed-out choral reveries of The Plateaux of Mirror sound downright stuffy by comparison. Not as mathematically perfect as Music for 18 Musicians, spirited enough to compensate for it.

VERDICT: ZAMN

Magazine - The Correct Use of Soap

On album closer “A Song From Under the Floorboards”, Howard Devoto sings of his insectile pride, and to be sure, there has always been a certain insectile quality to Magazine, from Dave Formula’s wheedling synths to John McGeoch’s scuttling guitar (now more melodious than ever). On their terrific 1978 debut Real Life, though, they were also kinda creepy, dispassionate even in their fitful paranoia, intellectuals with no real wisdom. Since then, Devoto has sounded more and more like a bug that thinks he’s a human— eugh. McGeoch is developing into a fierce utility player, though: “Because You’re Frightened” is a keeper because he knows just how to make everyone else get out of the way of his playing, and “Philadelphia” is a keeper because he knows just how to get out of everyone else’s way. But he can’t save the ill-conceived Family Stone cover, nor stop Devoto from ruining “You Never Knew Me” with sour grapes masquerading as piercing insights. Christgau called them pretentious and, well, I don’t not hear it.

VERDICT: FINE