Winston Cook-Wilson a.k.a. Winston C.W. is the deadpan lounge lizard frontman and keyboardist of hilariously slick 80s pop parody band Office Culture – whose debut record you’ll see on the best albums of the year page here at the end of this month. He has a new album, Good Guess, out under his own name, streaming at Bandcamp. The music is a lot more stripped-down and less cynically plasticky than his main project, and maybe a little less insincere. Ward White at his most sardonic is a good point of comparison.
The album’s first track is Cakewalk, a slow, swaying, chiming, Debussy-esque piano pop ballad – with a characteristically cruel punchline. Guitarist Ryan Beckley does a good job emulating a horn with his volume knob as bassist Carmen Rothwell keeps a steady pulse.
Business is much the same, a stroll “past the trappings of defeat.” As you might guess, the third track, Safety, is not about being safe at all, with its allusions to betrayal. The joke in Broken Drum is more musical rather than lyrical, the band gettting murky and rubato with some familiar “classic rock” riffs. “Maybe I look like someone who thrives for a minute in this brutal season, someone who forgets what it’s like to be that other guy,” Cook-Wilson muses innocently.
The sarcastically titled instrumental Swing Time is a slightly Lynchian stab at free jazz. The narrator of the increasingly creepy kiss-off ballad No Regrets is no less blithely callous than the characters in Cook-Wilson’s main band’s songs.
The album’s best story is Birds, an allusively grim narrative set to a cliched, saccharine 80s easy-listening pop backdrop. The abrasively trippy title track brings the record full circle, “a joyous day for a sad affair,” as Cook-Wilson puts it. For anyone who’s ever suffered through a retail dayjob where Lite FM plays on loop, this is sweet redemption.
The Doctor Swillings Band, once based in Maryland, are one of the rare rock acts who’ve been able to maintain their creativity by recording remotely this year. The now multi-state group – frontman Jon Lilly and special guests – have a very 80s feel, with sarcastic, quavery Dead Milkmen vocals and a snotty punkish edge matched to expert lead guitar that draws on decades of influences while retaining an icy, chorus-and-delay-pedal esthetic: haphazard elegance. As retro as their musical influences are, the issues they deal with are in the here and now: many of the songs deal with dead-serious implications of the lockdown. Their new album Making Monsters Men Again is streaming at youtube.
They open with the album’s simplest number, Oxygen and Gin, a clapalong over well-worn garage rock chord changes. With its icy,phased guitars, Shotgun Satan comes across as a mashup of early PiL and late 80s Psychedelic Furs, but with 90s vocals. “Drive like the devil’s in the car” is the message. The vibe isthe same in Greasy Monsters,awash in oscillating digital reverb and a cynical new wave drive .
2020 Survivor is built around a blippy synth patch and spare guitar jangle, a classic stoner lockdown theme reflecting one way to stay centered – more or less – amid this year’s relentless fearmongering and paranoia. The band get their bearings back with The Devil’s Wife, a slow/midtempo number with an ominous, allusive hook and a loopy vintage, Robert Fripp King Crimson guitar edge.
Action Man, one of the album’s sharpest, most focused tracks has a staggered beat and echoes of early 80s Siouxsie, with a boomy bass solo midway through. Wormhole, a rim sci-fi scenario, has a Lou Reed feel, its nails-down-the-blackboard Keith Levine tonalities matched to some metal crunch.
Jeff Bezos Space Center is definitely a song for this era, with its loping beat and falsetto vocals “Bezos, get out of my mind, whatcha gonna find?” From there, the band take an unexpected detour toward funk with the vampy When PeeWee Comes Back
With a ba-bump cabaret beat and burning distorted guitars, Maryland Manson very cleverly nicks the chord changes from the Sabbath classic Electric Funeral. The band follow with America’s Satan, a cynical political number with contrapuntal vocals over a blend of chilly 80s postrock and snide, phaser-driven metal: “Give me your money, your oil, your fear…your shopping, your lipstick, your fear!”
20th Century Masculine has a swirly mid-80s John Ashton jangle and crunch – think the Furs’ Mirror Moves album – over a ka-chunk, proto trip-hop beat. The album winds up with a couple of live tracks: Feeling Fantastic, a woozier, punkish take on the Blondie hit Dreaming, and You Don’t Know Me, which could be a Bowie psychedelic number from the Mick Ronson days, right down to the evil guitar duel midway through. Connoisseurs of smart, purposeful rock guitar are going to find a lot of inspiration here.
For an American band, All Souls sound very European: a little glam, a little goth, some punk, a lot of Bowie. Their album Songs for the End of the World is streaming at Bandcamp. All the members have gigs with other groups – most notably with Black Elk – but this really gives everybody in the band a chance to show off their good taste along with their chops. Frontman/guitarist Antonio Aguilar’s cynical, very 80s-inspired songwriting proves to be as sharp as his eclectic guitar playing.
They open with Sentimental Rehash, an acidic, no wave-tinged take on the Stooges, Aguilar raising a middle finger to clueless “media-manipulated minds” over drummer Tony Tornay’s rumble.
Twilight Times has dissolute Bowie grandeur and Stones disguised as skronk, the twin guitars of Aguilar and Erik Trammell anchored by Meg Castellanos’ gritty punk bassline. From there they segue up into Winds, the album’s big, slow, cynical, apocalyptic epic, flaring with quasi-metal guitar leads and a long, grimly hypnotic outro.
Bleeding Out opens with an insistent hook that brings to mind a big 80s anthem by the Church, veers toward New York Dolls territory and then back. Slowly pulsing over echoey, growling, scrapy guitar multitracks, You Just Can’t Win has a coldly crescendoing, distant 80s menace and unexpected tinges of Indian music. Then the band kick into apocalyptic Bowie mode again with Empires Fall
Lights Out has more allusive hints of Bowie and also some late Beatles, caught between enigmatic insistence and stadium rock hooks. Jaggedness and slow, catchy spacerock collide in Bridge the Sun, with a deliciously dark, chromatic outro. The album’s final cut is Coming with Clouds, a grim, Celtic-tinged seaside eco-disaster parable: “A history of violence, knowing that the time was finally at hand,” as Aguilar puts it. This album really grows on you and demands repeated listening. You’re going to see this on a lot of best-of-2020 albums lists at the end of the year if such things still exist by the time we get to December.
Back in 2017 this blog called Kingston, New York’s Galanos “the X of dark 21st century rock.” How convenient that their latest release, a similarly sinister three-song ep, would be streaming at Bandcamp in time for Halloween month this year. Fans of brooding punk-inspired sounds will love this band.
Frontwoman Netochka Nezvanova splits the vocals with a couple of the guys in the band, guitarist Gregjaw and bassist Joe Pugsley over drummer John Steele’s four-on-the-floor stomp. The first track, They Take it All Away is a punching, anthemic look at creeping fascism. It’s hard to think of a more appropriate anthem for the year of the lockdown: but the band offers hope at the end.
The second track is the most Halloweenish, a mashup of late 70s no wave and freaky jazz poetry. The final cut is The Death of a Wolf, which reminds a lot of early Siouxsie.
In a year where musicians and the arts are under assault more than at any other time in history, it’s heartwarming to see a group first featured on this page eight years ago still together and still putting out defiant and utterly unique music. Hungarian trio Dorota were characterized as “noisy noir punk surf jazz” here in 2012. Their latest album, Solar the Monk – streaming at Bandcamp – is just as noisy, more tuneful, and more influenced by late 70s no wave and 90s dreampop.
Is the blippy atmosphere at the beginning of the drony miniature that opens the album an allusion to sirens and lockdown-era fear? Actually not – the album predates the lockdown. The band don’t waste any time kicking into the first part of the album’s title track, a pouncing postrock stomp that recalls early Wire. Midway through, guitarist Dávid Somló, bassist Dániel Makkai and drummer Áron Porteleki slam out the same staccato E chord over and over as the overtones slowly rise. They reprise it later on with more syncopation and menacing clang.
The sternly marching third track, Neméreztem sounds like a group of Tibetan monks conjuring up an experimental rock ritual in a dingy Amsterdam club in 1979. Porteleki prowls mysteriously around his drum kit over spare atmospherics as Might Be Him takes shape, then the song morphs into a quasi-gospel groove punctuated by Makkai’s curlicue bass riffs.
Vacsorázin begins as a sputtering, drony dirge, then the monks return and chant their way slowly upward. The increasingly crazed instrumental Patient Religious Boys features flutes over boomy percussion, followed by the diptych The Stone Garden. The first part is just spare lo-fi keys and loops, then Somló switches back to guitar as Makkai’s looming chords rise along with Indian-flavored flutes.
From there we get dissociative ambience, Hare Krishnas on acid maybe, and twisted motorik noiserock. The concluding epic, It’s Gonna Rain slowly coalesces out of fuzzy, tensely wound bass to a wild stampede of guitar shred and huffing organ, and ends as you would expect. May this group survive the lockdown and continue to put out music as blissfully deranged as this.
Dennis Davison built a formidable back catalog as the leader of the Jigsaw Seen, one of the best and most lyrical psychedelic rock bands of the 90s and zeros. They played their final New York gig in late March of 2017 at Bowery Electric, an inspired set which proved that even at the end, they hadn’t lost their edge. In the time since then, Davison has hardly been idle, and has a characteristically brilliant new solo album, The Book of Strongman streaming at Bandcamp.
Here, Davison plays all the instruments. he’s always been a solid guitarist and distinctively articulate singer, but it turns out he’s competent on bass, drums and keys as well. As usual, his historically-informed, metaphorically bristling narratives scream out for the repeat button. The album’s opening number, Strongman and Sonny James, a big, stomping, angst-fueled anthem, follows a grim escape scenario:
Yellow bellies left for dead
Everyone was seeing red
Sanity was hanging by a thread
Juvenile soldier, flee!
Run like hell and return home safely to me
The ending comes as a surprise and makes perfect sense considering the current state of the world.
Shadow on a Tall Tree has a 60s Kinks/Merseybeat pulse rising to a lush ELO-ish chorus, awash in tremolo guitar and what could be a Stylophone keyboard. In the Folly of Youth begins as a wistful accordion-fueled folk-rock tune and hits a swaying Bowie-esque gravitas:
When the living is free there’s no misery
So it is and it was throughout history
Museum Piece is a sweeping, dreamy, subtly slashing, distantly Beatlesque portrait of a drama queen who’s seen better days. Bitternesss and disillusion reach fever pitch in the otherwise lushly anthemic Can You Imagine, which could be an early 80s number by the Church. Heaven Bound has a susupiciously blithe, strutting new wave bassline and layers of chilly guitars and keys: “You set your sights on the sky, that doesn’t mean you can fly,” Davison advises.
Organ and layers of keys swirl over stately strummed guitars in The Spoken Word, a meticulously detailed, cynical social media era parable. With bubbly bass paired against fuzzy guitar layers, Auras is the closest thing here to Davison’s old band.
Awash in vintage analog chorus-box sonics, the toweringly bittersweet Aberdeen Vista is arguably the album’s high point:
Clipper ships have sailed
Politicians jailed
Birthday cards were mailed
Locust on a string
Orange and black birds sing
Now we live as kings
In Aberdeen Vista
Davison winds up the album with What the Hell Is That Noise, an uneasily tongue-in-cheek, Love Camp 7-ish reminiscence of teenage experiments in avant garde soundscaping, complete with samples from his 80s basement duo project Bizarre Trolls with Kevin Mackenzie. You’ll see this on the best albums of 2020 page at the end of December, assuming there is a December this year.
Akron, Ohio band Librarians with Hickeys play expertly crafted, catchy, 1979-style powerpop. They jangle and clang, they like layers of guitars, cool keyboard accents and vocal harmonies. And they would have been huge if they’d been around back four decades ago (that’s a compliment). Their debut album Long Overdue is streaming at Bandcamp,
On one hand, this is the kind of album that’s a dead giveaway for what’s in the band’s collective record collection. On the other, the four-piece group – guitarists Ray Carmen and Mike Crooker, bassist Andrew Wilco and drummer Rob Crossley – have good taste. The opening track, Until There Was You is sort of Kirsty MacColl’s They Don’t Know About Us with twin-guitar grit and more of a four-on-the-floor drive. That Time Is Now follows a familiar rock progression (the best a band’s been able to do with it is the Church’s Bel Air) with dreamy harmony vocals by Lisa Mychols of the Seven And Six. And Then She’s Gone recounts the final scene in the film Ghost World where Enid, the Thora Burch character, gets on that magic bus at the end: the tune is a silkier take on Guided by Voices.
Be My Plus One is a sunshine pop number: Mrs. Brown, you’ve got a lovely daughter, I’d like to ask her out. Next Time is pure 80s, complete with watery chorus-box guitars, Crossley getting the clap-clap going with his syndrums. Likewise, the trebly, jangly, vamping Obsession could be the Church in a particularly poppy moment circa the Seance album.
The band mash up organ-livened Lyres garage rock with a little spacy new wave in Leave Me Alone and follow that with Poor Reception, another Church-like janglerocker that also recalls legendary/obscure 80s Long Island space-pop band the Hatracks. Wilco goes way up on his G string for the boomy chorus hook in Silent Stars, the album’s most hypnotically psychedelic track.
Carmen breaks out his Rickenbacker for extra clang in Alex, a gentle backbeat folk-rock number. The Church – that damn Oz band again! – come most strongly to mind in Looking For Home, but in the vein of a big rocker from, say, the Gold Afternoon Fix album. The band close the record with Black Velvet Dress, Crossley’s piano rippling above the guitar flare in this empathetic tale of a girl throwing a party for herself. Singalong hooks, expert craftsmanship, no wasted notes: what more could you want from guitars, bass and drums?
The last time anybody from this blog was in the house at a Linnea Olsson show, it was on a frigid February evening in 2014 at the now long-gone Highline Ballroom. Out in front of a big crowd that night, she played solo cello and sang a very brief, barely half-hour set of moody, skeletal chamber pop songs.
Olsson’s latest project is 180 degrees from that, a dark early 80s-influenced power trio, Maggot Heart. She leads the group and plays guitar, joined by bassist Olivia Airey and drummer Uno Bruniusso. Their latest album Mercy Machine is streaming at Bandcamp.
With its densely layered, ringing intro and contrastingly skronky loopiness, the opening track, Second Chance could be a more minimalist Bauhaus. For a song titled Sex Breath, the album’s punkish second cut is unexpectedly menacing, with a juicy, evilly watery guitar solo: Olsson has really taken her chops to the next level. This is a killer guitar record.
Driven by Airey’s gritty, chugging bassline, Justine wouldn’t be out of place on Siouxsie’s Juju album. The distortion on the bass gets even fuzzier for Roses, which comes across as syncopated Patti Smith with gothic chromatics and vocals spun tightly through a trebly flange effect.
Gutter Feeling has a ba-bump noir cabaret groove and some of the album’s most ghoulish lyrics: Olsson takes it galloping, doublespeed more or less, over a long bridge. The album’s death-obsessed title track is its most pummelingly punk-influenced moment: here as elsewhere, Olsson’s shrieking wide-angle chords bring to mind the late, great Siouxsie guitarist John McGeoch.
“All this talk about nothing gives us something to do,” Olsson intones cynically in High Rise, a mashup of Siouxsie and the Stooges. With its dissociative riffs popping up throughout the sonic picture, Lost Boys could be a straightforward, upbeat Live Skull number from the mid-80s.
Senseless has more of a slow, hypnotic early 80s growl and an ending where all hell breaks loose. The trio wind up this relentlessly interesting, disarmingly catchy album with Modern Cruelty and its contrastingly roaring and icy guitar multitracks, Olsson again threatening to go off the rails at any instant. Not a single substandard song on this album: there’s no telling what’s going to happen between now and the end of the year, but let’s hope there’s still a reason and an audience for a best albums of 2020 rundown when we get to December, Somebody has to keep music alive when the lockdowners are doing everything in their power to destroy it.
Toronto powerpop band the Fast Romantics’ new album Pick It Up – streaming at youtube – is their most keyboard-driven record yet. They draw on classic rock songcraft from the 60s through the 80s and have a sense of humor. This one isn’t as funny or melodically ambitious as their 2017 American Love album: it’s closer to what the New Pornographers have been up to most recently, along with influences from the Beatles to gospel.
The album opens with the title cut, a slow gospel piano ballad and an enigmatic look at the potential pitfalls of artistic creativity. We’re Only People has George Harrison-style slide guitar over steady Penny Lane-ish piano: “How did you find me in my hideout, how did you get me to come down?” frontman Matthew Angus wants to know.
Keyboardist Lisa Lorenz’s fuzzy 80s textures buzz beneath more of that swooping slide guitar in Made For You, a techier update on the Born to Run-era Springsteen the band love so much. The keys get starrier and also more symphonic in Hallelujah What’s It to Ya, which is more subtly irreverent than the title would imply.
The Rules is a wry Let It Be Beatlesque piano ballad, a sardonic look back at the price of nonconformity, with an unexpectedly defiant coda. “Watch me blow it all on sellout serendipity,” Angus muses in Top of the Mountain, a stoner trip-hop number that brings to mind early 90s Pulp.
The band follow Iso Radio, a creepily nocturnal, vaguely apocalyptic piano theme, with the album’s final track, Do No Wrong: “i made a mess so I’m clearing my history,” Angus relates over a catchy backdrop that’s part Motown, part new wave.
