Posts Tagged ‘Northern Spy’

Popular Posts Tagged ‘Northern Spy’

SUSS – “Chisholm Trail”
·274 Views
SUSS – “Ursa Major”
·180 Views
Oneida & Rhys Chatham – “You Get Brighter”
·147 Views
SUSS
·100 Views
Horse Lords
·49 Views

Horse Lords

by on ·New Albums, Reviews

Baltimore’s Horse Lords bring a constrained chaos on their fifth album, The Common Task. Built again on the hypnotic hurl of riff repetition that have cemented them in the halls of avant rock thus far, the band sets out to create one of their most cutting creations yet. The album opens with no pity, firing off heavy shots of guitar bounced through a maze of twisted glass tessellations on “Fanfare for Effective Freedom.” The song, tethered to the Earth only slightly by the lock-step rhythm section, is feeds melody and mechanics through the wood chipper and steps back to enjoy the spray. The tension on the song is shattered by the slide into the appropriately titled “Against Gravity,” which cuts that tether and slides into the stratosphere with some help from a humming sax and the celluloid slip of bass over the track. Its here that the band begins to make the album dig for blood. There’s still that hammerlock of repetition, but here the band begin to work the angles. Sax slashes from both speakers, the guitars still cycle into oblivion but it feels more dangerous and unpredictable. As the middle of the record looms, the band take post-rock punctuality and tie a tourniquet on the beat until it blackens.

Sharing a love for groove that begs some comparison to contemporaries like 75 Dollar Bill, the band tied together a work that’s diligently planned but still surprisingly unhinged. They delve deep into the tessellated inner workings of the spiraling mind. By the middle of the record the band push the listeners limits with the sonic scrape of “The Radiant City,” before diving again once more into the gnarled groove hammock of “The People’s Park.” The noise respite drives into bagpipe tones that threaten to slit the seams of the album before they interpolated Latinx funk with a political edged on the follow-up — a double punch that proves worth the wait. They cap the platter with a triple-sized dose that takes up 18 plus minutes on the flip, winding its way through simmering tones before smashing out the backdoor on a wave of Saharan funk and violin. The band’s been rightly heralded in the past for their precision and fire, and again they prove to be at the top of their class merging the desert, the basement club, the street corner, and the conservatory into one mindset shredded by an obsessive-compulsive chaos.



Support the artist. Buy it HERE.

0 Comments

SUSS

by on ·New Albums, Reviews

There’s a sense of cosmic wonder built into the sinews of Suss’ latest LP, High Line. The veteran NYC band blends a mix of ambient textures with a high plains country crawl that slices Bruce Langhorne with Barn Owl for a trip down an otherworldly rabbit hole. The album has a hermetic magic to it, lonesome, melancholy, but all consuming and engrossing in a way that seems to transcend more than just just feelings. Like a great work in sound design, Suss’ album seems to be narrating a journey, a wander through mystic corridors that’s beyond this plane. The songs ache with the hollowed marrow of driftwood — a life leeched by the sea and left to burn up in the sun – yet the discarded pieces of pulp have tales to tell, a world left behind in their sunbleached bends. High Line is an album marked by erosion and exfoliation, something that seeks to sink deeper into the strata beyond the dip of the horizon.

The band slinks from mirage to mirage, never explaining but always beckoning with a silent wave of the hand for the listener to follow deeper. It’s as if some truth might be uncovered over the next ridge, but there’s always a next ridge. Somehow when the glare recoils we’re left only with ourselves alone in a parking lot wondering if it was all shimmer and shine, or if those epiphanies were tangible and touchable. It doesn’t matter in the end. We’re changed and the sun sets a few degrees to the North from here on out. New maps are forged while the rest of the world sleeps. The album is the band at their peak, feeling out the lay lines of a new and dire era. For those who can see the cartography, this one’s gonna be a stunner. The rest will just hear the wind rustling and wander lost.




Support the artist. Buy it HERE.

0 Comments

SUSS – “Ursa Major”

by on ·Bits & Pieces, Tracks

After a stellar single earlier in the year, Brooklyn’s SUSS return with another take on a cosmic rinse to their ambient country sprawl. “Ursa Major” rises over the horizon in purple and blue hues, creeping with the cool density of low-lying mountain fog and practically yawning its way through a sauntered pace. The band hits many of the same notes from their “Chisholm Trail” single, especially evoking the flip, “Aurora.” The sawing of strings meets the opalescent slide of guitar and the whole thing melts into the rocks as the daybreaks through its cracks. The band’s new LP, High Line is out from Northern Spy November 8th and if my eyes don’t deceive me there’s another nice Darryl Norsen cover wrapped around it as well. Keep yer ears out for this one.



Support the artist. Buy it HERE.

0 Comments

SUSS – “Chisholm Trail”

by on ·Bits & Pieces, Tracks

Adding to the cosmic conversation, NY’s Suss molds lysergic instrumentals threaded through with a country calm and rippled with serenity. The band is grafting aquamarine slides and tear-jerked guitars to the radiant shimmer and ambient float of synths, creating a hybrid of William Tyler’s country pickers and Boards of Canada’s otherworldly ambiance. On the A-side to their upcoming single, “Chisholm Trail,” the band heralds their arrival with mournful harmonicas that seem to indicate a Morricone twang is imminent before melting like moonlight into warbling tones, buttery pedal steel, and galloping strums. The track’s about as meditative as they come, with just a touch of bittersweet on the back end, making this one easy to absorb before it slips away into the night on the edges of pre-dawn fog. The new single arrives June 28th from Northern Spy.




Support the artist. Buy it HERE.

0 Comments

Oneida & Rhys Chatham – “You Get Brighter”

by on ·Bits & Pieces, Tracks

They’ve played together in the past, including a stint at ATP in 2013 but this matchup had yet to put hte magic to tape until now. The union seems like a natural fit, though Chatham expressed doubt prior to their collaboration, but one listen to some of Oneida’s less rock driven material of late (the dub-inflected work on their split with Teeth of the Sea, the extended drone workouts of A List of the Burning Mountains) speaks to a like-minded meeting of innovators. The first track from the collaboration is bracing and brittle, but not so divorced from rock that it doesn’t have a feeling being comfortable on stage in front of a noise-rock crowd. As the track evolves it gathers a more experimental direction, and the notion of having to stay in the rock lane never seems like a given. The song growls and then breaks into a buzzing sea of feedback, chewed glass and wire. Its just the sort of track that I’m looking for with those two names up on the marquee.



Support the artist. Buy it HERE.

0 Comments