Disc Reviews
by Max Ink Staff Writers
mmeadows - Light Moves Around You
mmeadows
Album title: Light Moves Around You
By John Noyd
Posted: Jan 2023
Label: self-release
(327) Page Views
Pretty, slippery, star-dusted trip-hop encased into snowflake ballets, “Light,” sparkles and glows, flowing with amazing radiance, pleasingly regal poise and sweet angelic grace. Delicate melodies enunciated in charitable clarity, mmeadows’ origami arias flit and flutter, perched in lofty after-clubbing lullabies whose fluid coos and crystal synths rest on romantic enchantments hiding behind refined Valentine landmines. Ear-candy architects Dirty Projectors’ Kristin Slipp and collaborator Cole Kamen-Green bring polished softness to cautious showstoppers and supple wonder to life’s emotional puzzles. Draped in coy choral voices navigating glossy pop melancholy and beat-sweetened fantasies, the duo’s caressing perspectives and seducing illusions appear unbelievably achievable, dramatic masquerades unveiling unproven truths fitted in recording-studio couture, a balladeer’s paradise viewed through shatterproof glass with our own reflection superimposed onto the crafted pageantry.
R. Ring - War Poems, We Rested
R. Ring
Album title: War Poems, We Rested
By John Noyd
Posted: Jan 2023
Label: Don Giovanni Records
(452) Page Views
The intense sonic chemistry wrenched from, “Rested” vents savage aspirations by grafting gnashing catwalk-rock shrapnel to skulking sultry noise-pop shuffles. Brittle, splintered instigations riding seismic Bo Diddley twists mixing dark purrs curdled in surging murmurs, R. Ring’s marvelous second effort bursts in unexpected connections and frayed combinations. A palpitating collaboration between The Breeder’s Kelley Deal and Ampline’s Mike Montgomery, the duo brought in Bat Fang’s Laura King for a leisurely cohesive feel where muscular tugs stutter in lusty gusts and calmly detached crackles oversee the album’s relaxed feedback. A moody miasma throbbing in choppy guitars, harnessed drums and bloodletting bass, the fickle mingles with random cacophony as technical experts disassemble indie edicts, reinventing turbo-torqued engines for glorious joyrides, moonless rendezvous lit in bewitching midnight cool.
John Cale - Mercy
John Cale
Album title: Mercy
By John Noyd
Posted: Jan 2023
Label: Domino
(362) Page Views
The indelible infused with the incredible, Cale’s methodical plodding gels into spellbinding mindfulness. Tender but taunting, lively and laconic, “Mercy,” saunters in haunting honesty, placating pacing mania through somber homilies. Mesmerizing in deliberate directness, the iconoclastic master creates gauzed gazes glazed in chamber music synths while studio maneuvered grooves slither in liquid drifting mystery. Incandescent mantras march among regimented empathy as romantic candor hushed in plush sculptures and culled from alien landscapes open wounded hearts and nurse weathered memories. Enlisting a litany of talented acolytes including Laurel Halo, Weyes Blood and Animal Collective, Cale solidifies his cutting-edge reputation with futuristic flair, mobilizing sizeable ideas in celestial elegance. Electronic tone poems tinged in ephemeral menace composing compassionate fragments coalescing in narcotic beats sweeping beneath tentative meditations.
Beauty Pill - Blue Period
Beauty Pill
Album title: Blue Period
By John Noyd
Posted: Jan 2023
Label: Ernest Jenning Record Co.
(619) Page Views
Gooey nuanced grooves whose macabre karma frame cornered portraits inside deranged bangers, Beauty Pill’s still-life bile spills into septic mental crevices, percussive bluster tugging at eerily theatrical lyrics whose unnaturally casual passions present inventive temptations with giddy insinuation. The double LP anthology, “Blue Period,” compiles the band’s complete Dischord recordings from 2003-2005 including the full-length, “The Unsustainable Lifestyle,” their EP, “You Are Right To Be Afraid,” plus several previously unreleased outtakes and demos. Anachronistic mischief coils curdling turmoil into fractured cabaret for sonorous paranoia as the insurgent, “Blue,” tasks elastic mavericks with odd plots and obscure cures while biting wit, scorched modern-rock uproars and bold psychotropic momentum fuse musical cues veering from blissful visions synchronized with terse insecurities to skewed cool slithering in cautious confusion.
Cribshitter - Goin’ Soft
Cribshitter
Album title: Goin’ Soft
By John Noyd
Posted: Dec 2022
Label: self-release
(532) Page Views
Seven years after the party-hardy anarchy of, “Acapulco,” scene-stealing chameleons Cribshitter return with a slew of polished sardonic straight-face shenanigans with a heart of gold. Slick, prickly insinuations brew lewd moods inside rainbow grooves as yacht-rock runs aground on languid country twang and done-me-wrong songs stocked in pop-culture name-drops, supple subtle cuckolding and grimacing whimsy sing between sweet steel-guitar, electric piano and braying saxophone; an immersive, subversive circus seamlessly weaving dark humor embedded in sunny vibes and miniature musical interludes cruising among pedigreed medleys. Sorted stories bordering incorrigible metamorphosis where beats meander between tropical breezy and jukebox boppy, “Soft,” boxes lofty sophistry with sumptuous punches landing loving conundrums for smart art-pop knockouts, blissfully fictionalized surprises and fine-tuned irony, both sinister and innocent, sultry and huggable.
Heavy Looks - Apathy
Heavy Looks
Album title: Apathy
By John Noyd
Posted: Dec 2022
Label: self-release
(606) Page Views
Fierce sneers glaring with teeth-baring defiance, smiling, dark alley vipers Heavy Looks roll up their sleeves and put their foot down. Weighing in with side-eye piledrivers and streetwise desires, the band’s latest release unleashes armored hearts ripe in righteous soundbites and chip-on-the-shoulder poetry. Tough-minded drive demanding romance in cruise-control hopes and gate-crashing thrash, “Apathy,” grabs confrontational confessions by the collar wrestling sketchy tempests with soda-shop doo-wop inside double-fisted kiss-offs, deadpan emo anthems dipped in Phil Spector gloom and hefty basement-rock chops churning discerning earworms into licorice-twisted bubblegum. Packed in bewitching grit, bent venting and greaser freak-outs, the foursome swerve in go-go booted bop cast in metallic hooks and mechanical abandon, cathartic go-carts on a rock ‘n roll roller-coaster steering between gleeful delirium and numbed noir.
Raw Poetic - Space Beyond The Solar System
Raw Poetic
Album title: Space Beyond The Solar System
By John Noyd
Posted: Dec 2022
Label: 22nd Century Sound
(489) Page Views
Lobbed hip-hop dropped into seamless electric soul and funkified be-bop, “Space,” places woke flow into cinematic galaxies, polishing cosmic holograms into immaculate packages wrapped with satin, packed in class and fueled by cool. Be it laidback catalysts into inner space or skyrocket topics sampling outer space, Raw Poetic and musical partner Damu the Fudgemunk condense prime sentient memories, rising horizon vibes and polynomial tonality. Lit in soothing collusions between spiraling rhymes, spoon-fed grooves and stone-cold truths, the duo’s world-building skills fire up beautifully tuneful empires warming eclectic, collaborative sound-baths with Irreversible Entanglements’ bassist Luke Stewart and saxophonist Archie Shepp sitting in on a few sonic dips. Tag-teaming themes, merging breezy beats into tasty breaks, “Space,” synthesizes celestial scenarios, piggy-backing astral psychedelics onto phat pragmatic fact-checks.
Dry Cleaning - Stumpwork
Dry Cleaning
Album title: Stumpwork
By John Noyd
Posted: Oct 2022
Label: 4AD
(663) Page Views
While Dry Cleaning’s overall style hasn’t deviated from last year’s stunning, “New Long Leg,” the subtle evolution in textures and rhythms inside the intriguingly beleaguered, “Stumpwork,” deems repeated eavesdropping as the ear is tugged from casual trickling intricacy to sudden trudging floods. Lurking and skirting in playful disdain, Florence Shaw’s slow, droll vocals walk atop brittle skittish grooves with an uncaring flair for dispatched facts cooing over brackish alt-jazz backing lacquered in acrid factories. Riveting atmospheric criminal noir swerves and lurches in hypnotic oscillations as Lewis Maynard’s bass and Tom Dowse’s guitar pilfer off-kilter thrills in wobbly lobs and Pavlovian salvos, groping unfolding foreboding while slashing cinematic aftershocks with sweaty machetes and rumbling bludgeoning, a coiled electric cobra woven deep inside Nick Buxton’s stimulating rhythms.
Dehd - Blue Skies
Dehd
Album title: Blue Skies
By John Noyd
Posted: Sep 2022
Label: Fat Possum
(693) Page Views
Chicago’s upbeat three-piece Dehd shoots from the hip and say what they mean in unvarnished pardons and pounding shout-outs built from the ground up, stitching tasty basement greaser-rock onto lovelorn pop-punk rumbles. Honest, unadulterated songs whose succinct pitches and skeletal melodies stick around long after the record ends, “Skies,” relies on unpretentious friendliness, common problems and universal worries, connecting sensitive ends to streamlined means with gritty simplicity and daring sincerity. Cleansing benders sending headstrong throngs into last-chance dance-offs, the trio’s tribal tempos and lo-fi anthem shorthand finds joy in misery, trust in frustration and palatable salvation in cathartic martyrdom; a bonding call and response for tag-team dreamers shaking off life’s rat-race shackles. Dehd hit Madison’s Majestic Theater Wednesday, Sept 21st along with wonky word-spitter EXUM.
The Soft Hills - Viva Chi Vede
The Soft Hills
Album title: Viva Chi Vede
By John Noyd
Posted: Jul 2022
Label: Black Spring Records
(947) Page Views
An Italian phrase meaning alive to see, The Soft Hill’s latest laser-guided escapades envision brain-teasing mazes padded in fragile astral magic. Dreamy bleeding synthesizers sprinkled over twilight pining melts into sublime sunshine, tender expressions rendered with a touch of twang layered in crackling static floating over heavenly havens, The Soft Hills’ yielding, congealing fieldtrips conjure microcosmic odysseys whose surreal charades offer lighthouse fog melancholy alongside jaunty polyrhythmic mischief. Navigating psychic spaces in a soothing confluence of frail alien transmissions, vagrant pedal steel and unwavering folk-pop sincerity, “Viva,” asks only a moment before capturing the long last in the might have been; a translucent infusion of witty sympathy, luminous despair and cool absolution. Good-natured and well-meaning, the album’s weathered effervescence envelopes the groovy with the moody.
Colin Stetson, Billy Martin, Elliot Sharp & Payton MacDonald - Void Patrol
Colin Stetson, Billy Martin, Elliot Sharp & Payton MacDonald
Album title: Void Patrol
By John Noyd
Posted: May 2022
Label: Infrequent Seams
(1045) Page Views
Time arrested, contested and suggested, “Void Patrol,” blooms in unraveled prog-jazz cocoons, collateral accidents coalescing through communal grooves moving in electronic ripples, saxophone splashes and wood-block waves laying a dark rhythmic undertow bubbling beneath darting catharsis and textured conjecture. Ambient phantoms whose disruptive conjunctions yield strangely logical options teetering between ephemeral genesis and unruly conclusions; Stetson on saxophone, Sharp on strings and electronics, Martin on drums and percussions and MacDonald on keyboard percussion lunge from cunning conundrums to sinister quivering, chasing pacing deviations towards distinct destinations. The experimental quartet culls years of experience with bands as disparate as Arcade Fire and Medeski Martin and Wood to navigate murky curiosity for thirsty excursions through galactic abstractions basking in exploratory detours with casual grace and eerie accuracy.
Porridge Radio - Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky
Porridge Radio
Album title: Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky
By John Noyd
Posted: May 2022
Label: Secretly Canadian
(2455) Page Views
Visceral, truth-spewing grooves building introspective art-punk mantras into ranting garage-rock anthems, “Waterslide,” rides mystical misery into empathic catastrophes with raw, authentic sentiments defending emotional devotionals stalking haunted contemplations and spouting mouthy outrage brimming in incisive insights. Focused, corrosive, struggling to restrain strenuous contentions, Porridge Radio tunes into life’s terse mercies, punctuating twists and turns in calculated impacts, maiming refrains and struggling couplets. Swirling Wurlitzers slithering in melancholy waltzes and shoegaze guitars launching cauterized onslaughts, the band’s driving force is scored in core values, deep-seated feeling and existential energy. Earthy diversions cruising and perusing wounded crusades centered in impenetrable futility, the British quartet’s latest effort begs in dredged confessions while styled in unwavering obsession, a mesmerizing maelstrom whose subtle culmination drives aggressive messages with smoldering diplomacy.
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