Band: Tiny Little Houses Album: Misericorde Label: Ivy League Release: November 19th, 2021
Rating: 9/10
The tagline for Misericorde boasts that it chronicles Caleb Karvountzis’ “search for salvation through suffering”. That’s enough to lure in any emo worth their eyeliner, but what’ll keep them buckled in are the gristly, jacked‑up pop guitars, brute-force beats and razor-sharp honesty.
Three years removed from Tiny Little Houses’ debut (2018’s Idiot Proverbs), Karvountzis has levelled up from a tinnie‑slamming sad-boy to a cosmopolitan family man. Thus – and yes, we acknowledge how cliché this is to say – it’s a notably matured album. Such is tangible in the gravity of Karvountzis’ songwriting, but even moreso in the band en bloc’s musicality: the riffs are bold, crunchy and calamitous but never grating or obnoxious, and the hooks, while buoyant and catchy, wield a striking emotional weight.
Please note: this review is also printed in #145 of Australian Guitar Magazine, syndicated here because AG’s album reviews are no longer published online.
So in the intro for the last roundup, two weeks ago, I mentioned that Milo and I were heading down to Naarm/Melbourne for a week to look at a couple of apartments (see: 18 of them). We ended up finding one that we adored – the second one we looked at, on our first day in the city – and we managed to have our application processed and approved within a day… So, uh… We live in Naarm now! Postcode 3000, baybeeeeeee!
We moved everything in yesterday. I am… Very exhausted 😅
So with that said, I’m not gonna do much of an intro this time around. But I have linked two songs from the past fortnight that I have been frothing HARD – ‘27 Club’ by Trophy Eyes and ‘Say It To My Face’ by DZ Deathrays – and the new film clip for ‘The Man Himself’ by Gang Of Youths, because it is just spellbinding.
Nevertheless, here’s everything I got up to at NME over the past couple of weeks!
Artist: Courtney Barnett Album: Things Take Time, Take Time Label: Milk! / Remote Control Release: November 12th, 2021
Rating: 8.5/10
CB’s 2015 debut was brisk, bright and lively, like a summer’s day at the beach. Its follow-up was sharp, ripping and acerbic, like the storm that night. So, naturally, LP3 feels like the morning after: foggy and humid, debris from the wind scattered over the lawn. It’s clear Barnett is much more comfortable in her storytelling these days – the songs are reflective, inspired, and distinctly human.
Production is loose and experimental; percussive clicks and pops meld with raw, cerebral fretwork. The soundscape is overall very sparse and relaxed, letting tracks like the drowsy, pseudo-celestial “Here’s The Thing” and the groovy, buoyant and punchy (if far too short) “Take It Day By Day” really shine.
Though certainly not as immediate or memorable as Barnett’s earlier work, Things Take Time is beautiful and brilliant in many ways.
Please note: this review is also printed in #144 of Australian Guitar Magazine, syndicated here because AG’s album reviews are no longer published online.
Things Take Time, Take Time is set for release on November 12th, 2021 via Milk! / Remote Control. Click here to pre-order.
Band: Snail Mail Album: Valentine Label: Matador / Remote Control Release: November 5th, 2021
Rating: 9/10
Equally as glittery as it was melancholic, Lush – the aptly titled debut from Maryland indie stalwart Snail Mail (aka Lindsey Jordan) – had a notable ‘lightning in a bottle’-esque quality. It wowed with meticulous production and conscientious songwriting, but it also shone for its blithesome looseness and brazen confidence, Jordan committing herself wholly both as a classically trained musician with an ear for technicality and a dorky queer teen living in the peak of meme culture.
Three years on, Jordan doesn’t try to recreate that magic. It would seem she isn’t so keen, either, to reinvent herself – she knows she has a niche, and she’s happy to lean into it – but there’s a clear determination to evolve and experiment. Where warm, fuzzed-out Jaguar chords laid the groundwork on Lush, they’re just one small chunk of a much broader, more vibrantly vegetated soundscape on Valentine. We open with the title track, filmy and ethereal synths flooding the mix as Jordan’s cool, honeyed rasp dances over them – until about a minute in, when she and her band erupt into a bold and emphatic chorus.
There’s a fierce, St. Vincent-channelling swagger on “Ben Franklin”, and a dip down into the doughier, more pensive indie flair of Jordan’s early work on “Headlock”. In succession, these three tracks paint an orphic and arresting picture of the album as a whole: rich, soul-baring songwriting twined around poignant and pictorial – and above all, interesting – melodies.
But as the album continues to unwind, so too does it continue to surprise – whether it be via the folky acoustic fingerstyle and warm violin on ‘Light Blue’, heady tinges of blustery ‘90s pop on ‘Forever (Sailing)’, or subtle, smoky prongs of bass guitar on ‘Madonna’, tastefully accented by eerie stringwork and a warbling synth. Even the most zealous fans are bound to blindsided by something unpredictable – yet entirely welcomed – as not a second of Valentine feels like it was penned without the utmost care and consideration.
Jordan’s use of space is especially admirable. A track can have two guitars, a kinetic beat, strings and synths in abundance and her own dryly sung, kaleidoscopic quips, yet never feel cluttered. In fact, the record often sounds distinctly lowkey, Jordan maintaining a prudent tact throughout despite such a dense array of colours and tones at her disposal.
This, too, is reflected boldly in her lyricisms – sharp and stormy, but delivered in such a way that makes Jordan come off as down-to-earth and reticent. She never teeters on vaudeville, but the dramatisation of her inner turmoil is always gripping and grandiose. She drums up a wealth of emotion, potent and impassioned, and makes it all look effortless in the process.
So, on Valentine, Jordan doesn’t look to recreate the magic she made with Lush; instead, she makes a whole new kind of magic – one that is endlessly more… Uh… Magical.
Please note: this review is also printed in #145 of Australian Guitar Magazine, syndicated here because AG’s album reviews are no longer published online.
Valentine is set for release on November 5th, 2021 via Matador / Remote Control. Click here to pre-order.
Band: Mastodon Album: Hushed And Grim Label: Reprise / Warner Release: October 29th, 2021
Rating: 8.5/10
Whether it really makes the most of its 86-minute runtime is debatable, but immediately clear is that with Hushed And Grim, Mastodon have thrown all caution to the wind – it’s epic both in size and statue, stacked to the brim with fretwork as striking as it is sophisticated. In the six-minute “Sickle And Peace” alone, the band employ mind-boggling technicality, walloping shreddery and a truly empyrean solo.
Throughout the record at large, they expertly balance the prodigious might of their narrative prowess with the ashy bleakness of their sludge metal roots – there are stoutly cerebral moments that call for deep, contemplative reflection, but just as many moments that beckon an instinctive whipping up of the horns and thrashing of the head. It’s not a “heavy” record, per se, but it is positively intense.
Please note: this review is also printed in #145 of Australian Guitar Magazine, syndicated here because AG’s album reviews are no longer published online.
Hushed And Grim is set for release on October 29th, 2021 via Reprise / Warner. Click here to pre-order.
It’s feels like a whole year has passed since the last roundup! In addition to writing for the ✨New Musical Express✨ every day for the last 13 days, I’ve been apartment-hunting with Milo, enjoying all of my post-lockdown freedoms (I finally saw Shang-Chi! It was fucking sick!!!), planning a trip down to Melbourne (we leave tomorrow!), and doing a whole bunch of other little bits and pieces.
We sent Australian Guitar #145 to print last week, and this week I made my radio debut on The Faction (interviewing the legendary Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die). I even started reading a new book for the first time in like eight months (Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters – so far, it is… harrowing).
It’s been a hectic little while, to say the least. But it’s been great! I’m really looking forward to heading south and seeing my favourite city in the world again – and hopefully, fingers crossed, knock on wood, etc, finding an apartment there. At this stage we’re heading down for five nights, but we might end up extending that depending on what kind of luck we have with the hunt. I’m also working through the whole trip (how else am I going to afford that #citylife?) so I’m expecting next week to be even more hectic than the last couple.
The biggest drop this week was 100% the new Alex Lahey single, ‘Spike The Punch’. I am so, so stoked that she’s signed to Liberation, and I truly cannot wait to see her take over the world with LP3. I have also been absolutely adoring the new Snail Mail album, Valentine, so I’m gonna pop the title track in here too. I already know that next week’s highlight will be the Trophy Eyes song – keep an eye out on BLUNT for our ~exclusive~ interview with John about it on Thursday!
Anyway, here’s everything I got up to at NME over the past couple of weeks!
Band: Every Time I Die Album: Radical Label: Epitaph Release: October 22nd, 2021
Rating: 8/10
In the five years since Every Time I Die dropped Low Teens, shit has, to say the very least, hit the fan. Radical concentrates those five years of social disarray and capitalistic chaos into the Buffalo group’s most vicious and evocative album yet, laden with brutally intense riffage and visceral, incendiary rage.
It’s the more artful and considered moments that stand out, though: the swampy, pared-back plucks on “Thing With Feathers” and the soaring melodies on “Post-Boredom”, for example, or the white-hot angst of closer “We Go Together”. These tracks make some of the more straightforward hardcore stompers (“Hostile Architecture”, “Distress Rehearsal”) fall a bit flat – there’s certainly some mud amongst the opals here – but to say Radical ever overstays its welcome would be patently false.
Please note: this review is also printed in #145 of Australian Guitar Magazine, syndicated here because AG’s album reviews are no longer published online.
Band: Thrice Album: Horizons / East Label: Epitaph Release: September 17th, 2021
Rating: 8/10
A sinuous odyssey through all the lustrous highs and pummelling lows of Dustin Kensrue’s psyche, there’s a gauzy, intoxicating cloudiness that lurks around every corner on Horizons / East. It ebbs and flows between a meditative calm and a baleful storminess, twining glimmers of thrashy and visceral punk-rock with the glittery, pastoral flavours of shoegaze and prog.
The rusty, shred-centric steeze of early cuts like “Scavengers” and “Summer Set Fire To The Rain” pave way for the record’s lighter and more silvery back-end to bloom; riding on the back of the blood-rushing highs of “The Dreamer”, “Robot Soft Exorcism” feels therapeutic – the calm after the storm, if you will, with a soaring and cinematic crescendo that makes the silky, dreamlike lulls of “Dandelion Wire” and “Unitive / East” all the more impactful.
Please note: this review is also printed in #145 of Australian Guitar Magazine, syndicated here because AG’s album reviews are no longer published online.
Band: The Buoys Album: Unsolicited Advice For Your DIY Disaster Label: Spunk Release: October 13th, 2021
Rating: 8/10
Lacquering their youthful, sunkissed power-pop jams with lyrical barbs that shoot straight for the heart, The Buoys’ sophomore EP would feel just as much at home roaring from the PAs at next year’s Splendour In The Grass as it would through a pair of AirPods during a casual quarter-life crisis.
Zoe Catterall and Hilary Geddes’ yin-and-yang fretwork sears with a frisky, jangly grunt, contrasted wonderfully by Courtney Cunningham’s rounded and propulsive basslines. Teeming with energy even at their lowest point, the band often veer scarily close to the edge of overkill – you know what they say: if you ain’t redlining, you ain’t headlining – but they always know just when to reel it back in. Case in point: the dizzying bends and bubbly hook on slow-burner “Lie To Me”.
Please note: this review is also printed in #145 of Australian Guitar Magazine, syndicated here because AG’s album reviews are no longer published online.
So I’ve been trying something new this week. Bruno has been getting rather ✨chonky✨ throughout lockdown, and Milo and I have been neglecting his usual walkies and/or trips to the dog park by proxy of my work piling up, and Milo’s study piling up. But rather than continue to watch Bruno progressively get rounder, we decided on Tuesday to take him to the park with my laptop, and have Milo supervise while I tried smashing out some work from a park bench. It wasn’t entirely optimal, but it worked – and the dogs weren’t nearly as distracting as I thought they’d be (however it was indeed extremely difficult not to spent the whole time petting them all) – so we ended up doing the same on Wednesday and Friday.
NSW also hit its 70% double-vax target on Wednesday, so we are OFFICIALLY OUT OF LOCKDOWN TOMORROW, BAYBEE! I have the day off, too, so Milo and I are heading out for breakfast at one of our favourite cafés, then to the movies (ya bitch is finally going to see Shang-Chi, and they cannot fucking wait), and then maybe to the arcade after if we’re both up to it.
So with all of that said, here’s everything I got up to at NME this week. The highlight for this week was easily the new Gang Of Youths track, but I didn’t write the piece about that because the UK team is just too good at breaking shit-hot Aussie news. Goddamn it. I think the best thing I wrote about this week is the new Flowerkid song, “Vodka Orange Juice”. It is so powerful, emotional and cerebral. This dude just does not have it in him to write a bad song, does he? Absolute GEM of a track.
MATT DORIA 