Single: The Van Pelt – A Voralberg of the Mind
The second single of the legendary indie band’s comeback album couches obscurity in a collage of spoken-word repartee and effervescent guitars.
Leo August
Album: Peaks of Valleys – Eclipse
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.
Album: Ahana – Soma
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.
Single: The Race – Family Tree
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.
Single: A Mess – Save Some Happiness
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.
EP: Tom Coward – Have a Word With Yourself
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.
Single: Beatrice Beatrice – Aquella Persona
From one dismally caliginous room in Santiago, Chile to wherever you are, Beatrice Beatrice sends their love and this song to keep you company.
Album: funeral plain – negation of negation
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.
Single: Gingham – Cross Country
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.