On Vertigo, Dillon Jo creates an atmosphere of dizzying stagnation with one needle-point view of clarity. Even though everything is spinning, one thing is clear enough and just as unmoving as you feel: you shouldn’t go through with it, with what can kill you. You should get through it, that thing that is killing you.
It’s quite simple, really. It’s a classic case of a catch-22. You wear the clothes that present you in a certain way to others, but they don’t always get it right. So, you try to convince yourself that you don’t dress the way you do for others, so who is it all for? Well, blankette can tell you who it is not all for.
This is not a story of a haunted house; it is instead about the haunted self. The ghosts that live on your tongue, behind your eyes, and wrapped around your sullen limbs. You are haunting yourself. This album’s musical landscape stalks closer and closer to you until it is close enough for you to realize it was never chasing you; it was nudging you toward this epiphany: you are haunting yourself.
With a perfect, succinct title for what it wants to evoke, If I… by Sluggg is a drawling consideration of what you wish you had, starting with the obtainable and then abruptly entering the unattainable over a slow crawl of a bedroom pop production.
If you miss when pop-punk and emo were a genuine kick in the gut because of how genuine the songs themselves were… you don’t have to anymore. Overbreak have got you covered with their newest single, Colourless.
Haunted Images’ dream-like sonic landscape examines how the urge to abandon humanness for perpetual apathy is the most human thing of all.
The second single of the legendary indie band’s comeback album couches obscurity in a collage of spoken-word repartee and effervescent guitars.
Eclipse by Peaks of Valleys, an electronic/ambient indie rock band from Madison, Wisconsin, is the sonic equivalent of a closing eye, too stubborn to submit to sleepiness or an eclipse that is too shy to be observed but self-assured enough to appear in the sky. It rests at an in-between state of dark and light. Sleep and wakefulness. Absence and appearance. This is a record that is comfortably contradictory in terms of both its lyrics and the soundscape it engenders that wreathes your ears reminiscent of the velvetiness of the music of bands like Amber Run and Sleeping At Last.
On her debut album, Soma, Ahana – with her elaborate embroidery of a heritage, originally being both Portuguese and Northern Indian – takes the focus off of everything but the body. Then she takes you through a swooping journey on which you discover that the things you thought you were looking for are not the things you long to find. And the body has all the answers if you care or dare to ask.
Over a barbed mix of guitars and drums a la The Smashing Pumpkins, The Race pulls out the thorns in your side and tells you that you are fine, that you are enough, that you can just be here.
With no preamble, Save Some Happiness by A Mess bursts out into its hook at the start and fizzles out in the same way at the end. The song also begins and ends with the same command: save some happiness for yourself. It is almost like this message, over a patter of chimes from the buoyant guitars and a steady backing from the percussion, acts as a sudden disruption in your day to remind you to be kinder to yourself then scurries off.
In the span of five songs, Tom Coward derides, decides, decries, and derives whatever he can from the world and its residents on his debut EP, Have a Word With Yourself, which in and of itself is a mockery of a parental reprimand reconfigured to be self-appointed as a message to anybody who listens to the songs: have a word with yourself. Confront and admonish yourself.
From one dismally caliginous room in Santiago, Chile to wherever you are, Beatrice Beatrice sends their love and this song to keep you company.
On Negation of Negation, over a whirring, staticky noise-rock score, Chicago-based band, Funeral Plain proposes that destruction is essentially a form of change. And losing yourself implicitly raises the possibility that you will find yourself; and that when you do, you will discover nothing, or in lyricist, Jonny Gill’s words, ‘no-thing.’ This record argues, as Jonny Gill told me, that there is no innate being, just a continual process of becoming. But first you have to lose yourself.
Excerpt: Gingham captures the portrait of a person who is running out of his own frame because he believes he belongs in somebody else’s picture. This endeavor is set to an undulating smattering of bristly guitar dappling the percussion that awkwardly shuffles the song forward, as if the track itself is the person limping toward the crowd that has long surpassed him. But here’s the best part: he never stops running.
