One of New York’s Great Surf and Twang Guitarists Visits a Familiar Williamsburg Watering Hole This Week

Jason Loughlin is one of the elite guitarists in Americana because he has his own sound rather than just a deep bag of recycled country and blues licks. Much as there probably aren’t many classic country and surf rock licks he doesn’t know, he always finds a way to make them sound fresh. Big names – Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris among them – are aware of this and have enlisted his services for a long time. But Loughlin is also a bandleader, and has had a regular more-or-less monthly residency at Skinny Dennis pretty much since they opened, with a long break during the collective insanity in 2020 and 2021. He’s back there with his band on March 16 at 9.

Loughlin’s recorded output as a leader is not extensive, but what he has is absolutely brilliant. His most recent album, Peach Crate came out quite awhile ago – his Bandcamp page lists two different dates. If expertly twangy guitar instrumentals that transcend the surf genre are your thing, you have to hear this (and you may have already – getting to this one a little late!) It’s also been quite awhile since this blog was in the house at Loughlin show. If memory serves right, the last time was at the old Hank’s in 2015, where he was playing his usual tasteful, purposeful leads alongside folk noir songstress Jessie Kilguss.

He opens the record with the warm, briskly shuffling title track, a western swing highway theme with some snazzy, rapidfire guitar riffage over sailing layers of lapsteel, bassist Jason Hogue and Stephen Chopek subtly pushing the beat.

Loughlin builds an intricate web of lickety-split, tongue-in-cheek Buck Owens Bakersfield phrasing in the second track, Whoopsie Daisy. Tango and Cash is a real treat, part loping Ventures summer surf theme, part chiming countrypolitan, part Tex-Mex. Woody’s in the Hood is another gem of a mashup, a Django shuffle as noir icons Big Lazy would have done it.

Likewise, Steep Grade is a creepy, picturesque spiderwalking number, but with plenty of jokes too good to give away. The trio pick up the pace with She’s Something Sweet, a percolating blend of Bakersfield twang and elegant 60s soul. Hello Tijuana, Goodbye Kidney is not the horror tableau you might expect, but instead, a plush, lingering 6/8 ballad without words. Who knew that being on the wrong side of an organ trafficking scheme could be so enjoyable!

Loughlin builds a tight web of jump blues-flavored twin harmonies in Recordian and follows with the chugging, erudite Slack Jaw, part Buck Owens, part late-period Bob Wills, with Rich Hinman on pedal steel. Loughlin winds up the album with Headless Body Topless Bar, a slow, lurid roadhouse theme with echoes as diverse as the Raybeats and the Friends of Dean Martinez.

Advertisement

Darkly Ambient Americana Instrumentalists Suss Headline an Enveloping, Inviting Brooklyn Triplebill Tomorrow Night

In 2018 this blog called cinematic instrumental group Suss “the missing link between Brian Eno and Ennio Morricone – or the Lost Patrol without the drums.” They were a quintet then. Tragically, they’ve been whittled down to a trio after the sudden 2021 loss of keyboardist Gary Lieb, but they keep putting out frequently mesmerizing, sometimes Lynchian deep-sky themes. Their latest album is a double-cd release comprising both their Heat Haze southwestern travelogue suite and their even more nocturnal Night Suite along with new material.

They’re headlining a great lineup tomorrow night, Feb 8 at around 10 PM at Public Records, that shi-shi monstrosity in the former Retrofret space north of Gowanus. As a bonus, deadpan and often hilariously lyrical new wave pop spoofers Office Culture open the night at 8ish, followed by the trippy electroacoustic trio of saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, bassist Paul Bryan and drummer Jeremy Cunningham. Cover is pretty steep for a show like this, presumably $24 since the venue is one of many in Brooklyn who seem to be oblivious to the rising popularity of #cashalways and are still trying to make it with the goofy pennies-and-nickels online ticketing fad.

Both Suss’ Night Suite and Heat Haze got the thumbs-up here. The new tracks – the first several of which you can hear at Bandcamp – are just as drifty and evocative. Beyond Jonathan Gregg’s resonant pedal steel and spare dobro, it’s impossible to tell whether that’s Pat Irwin or Bob Holmes on the many other guitar and keyboard tracks. The first is a miniature, Winter Is Hard, rising from a delicate little piano figure to a flaring slide guitar peak and then out.

The band blend keening ebow textures, slow doppler effects, stalagmite piano drips and icepick reverb guitar incisions in North Wind. The most lingering thing in Linger is the gentle, precise acoustic guitar and the reverbtoned steel over the puffing, echoey loops in the background. Everything Is So Beautiful is steady and sad and Lynchian, and over too soon.

By now, the band are working variations on that initial crystalline three-note theme, notably in the rising and falling icy/hot textures of The First Thaw. Then they reprise Winter Was Hard with some unexpected timbres like autoharp and some gritty mechanical whirs.

At this point, you will have to switch to yucky Spotify to hear the rest of the record. Across the Horizon is aptly vast but peppered with warmly anticipatory fragments of blues and C&W riffs. The band warp the sustain a little in Ranger as a solitary acoustic guitar surveys the great plains, then in Shimmer (Reflection) they bring back the delicate quasar pulse: a distant Blue Velvet galaxy.

Holmes breaks out his mandolin and slowly works his way up in the mix in That Good Night. They waft their way out with the gentle phrases in The Open Door, shifting slowly through a characteristically twilit tableau.

Fearless Microbiology Expert Dr. Jessica Rose Creates a Party Playlist For the Noncompliant

Dr. Jessica Rose is one of the world’s foremost experts on the VAERS database of vaccine injury and death in the US. Despite the seriousness of her research, she has a devastatingly deadpan sense of humor and a sleuth’s determination to figure out where the data is and what it tells us. She’s also one of the most lucid and entertaining writers on subjects ranging from microbiology, to biostastistics and lipid nanoparticles. She documents her research (and her surfing adventures, and her cats) on her Substack page. You should subscribe!

And like a lot of the fighters on the frontline of the freedom movement, she’s an interesting and original musician. Keyboards are Rose’s axe. Like her writing, her instrumentals have a quirky charm and a devious sense of humor. Most of them you can dance to: Rose is definitely a bon vivant. There’s a ton of her work up at Bandcamp as a free download, and if this kind of stuff is your thing, you should grab it while it lasts.

Somehow, between conferences and interviews and writing scientific papers with Dr. Peter McCullough, Rose has found time to make a short album, titled Thank Him For His Email and Cut Him Off. It has three tracks: a wryly loopy march, a funky strut and a piece where she multitracks polyrhythmic piano and organ before taking it in a minimalist dubstep direction.

Rose’s previous albums are also a lot of fun. The oldest album up at Bandcamp, going all the way back to 2012, is There Will Be Words (one of the free downloads). This one actually has words. Rose’s determined individualism comes across in a mix of bouncy, playful themes that echo Bjork, Goldfrapp, Tom Tom Club and vintage Kraftwerk, infused with catchy, diversely textured riffage and occasional airy, multitracked vocals. One of the more sweeping, orchestrally majestic instrumentals has bass, flute and an irresistibly funny lakeside scene. There are also shamanic percussion interludes, an ominous tableau with flaring guitar, some trip-hop, a loopy gnawa tune and an empowering rap about being in this for the long haul. Was that prophetic or what?

True to the title, There Are No Words – another 2012 release, and a free download – is pretty much all-instrumental. There’s a trio of catchy New Order-style dancefloor jams, a couple of action movie-style themes, and a bit of what could be a medieval chorale.

Inertia, a 2014 release, is very sarcastically titled: the beats come flying out of this one. There’s a lot of late 70s Tangerine Dream and Alan Parsons sequencer influence, with an epic twelve-minute salute to transgression to close it out. And Rose picked up right where she left off with a couple of singles she released in March, 2020: the consistent theme throughout her music seems to be to party for our right to fight.

The World’s Most Cinematic Guitarist Continues His Dark Dynasty

It was the spring of 2016, and cinematic instrumental trio Big Lazy had just finished slinking their way through a slowly simmering, increasingly macabre, chromatically slashing crime theme. The Brooklyn bar was packed, and people were dancing, notwithstanding the band’s somber, noir-drenched sonics.

Then guitarist Steve Ulrich took the mic and led the band through a brisk if somewhat wistful new wave song. Half the audience did a doubletake: a Big Lazy song with lyrics, in a major key, no less!

But fans of Ulrich’s signature blend of nocturnal bristle, deep-sky twang and white-knuckle improvisational scramble know that he has a completely different body of work. In addition to Big Lazy – the first band to top the best-albums-of-the-year lists here twice, in 2014 and 2019 – Ulrich does a lot of work in film and other media. His soundtrack to the artworld forgery documentary Art and Craft ranges from his signature, shadowy style to more lighthearted terrain. And now, he’s finally released a compilation of some of his most vivid and surprisingly eclectic soundtrack work from the NPR series This American Life, due to hit his Bandcamp page. Ulrich is celebrating the release of the album with a characteristically epic night on Feb 4 at 7 PM at the Sultan Room, playing a set with a string quartet, then bringing Big Lazy in to close the evening. The venue is easy to get to from the Jefferson St. stop on the L; like a lot of the trendier Brooklyn joints, they’ve become enamored of weird online dollars-and-cents cover charges, meaning that $26 cash should get you in.

On one hand, this is the great lost Big Lazy album. On the other, it’s more texturally diverse and slightly more lighthearted: the increased use of keyboards is a newer development for Ulrich. Typically, he’ll lay down a simple, muted riff and then judiciously add layers.

The first track, Earthly begins as a klezmer-tinged, lithely pulsing, delicately disquieted cha-cha, drummer Dean Sharenow spacing out his playfully counterintuitive hits, keyboardist Thomas Bartlett channeling a deep-space cabana with his lightly processed piano. Ulrich orchestrates bass and lapsteel into the mix as well.

The group slowly straighten out into a dark, wry strut in Handheld as Ulrich’s layers of skeletal guitar and resonant lapsteel mingle with Bartlett’s occasional roller-rink organ. In track three, The Swell, they trace a similar light-footed path, following a familiar Ulrich pattern, shifting almost imperceptibly out of the shadows into a sunny pastoral theme and then back.

Fellow Traveler is not a Chinese army song but a syncopated waltz with hints of dub and classic country, courtesy of Ulrich’s baritone guitar work. Surprise, Arizona is a Big Lazy concert favorite that first took shape in the wake of a 2019 tour, a stern Appalachian theme that diverges into mysterious sagebrush.

Ulrich’s sense of humor tends to be on the cynical side, but Rinse Cycle – the loopiest number here – is irresistibly funny and a good example of how far afield he can go from Big Lazy noir when he feels like it. He begins Housebroken as a forlorn bolero over Sharenow’s shuffling snowstorm beats: it’s the closest thing to Big Lazy here and the album’s creepiest song.

The most jazz-inflected tune here is If and When, a classic example of how Ulrich can take a whimsical theme and turn it inside out in a split-second, Bartlett shadowing the unfolding menace with his airy fills. The most brisk tune here is Unpretty, which is actually very attractive, in a delicate, melancholy vein

Bookworm turns out to be an apt coda, a bouncy swing tune where Ulrich flips the script on his usual trajectory. It’s still January, but Ulrich just might have given us the answered to the question of what the best album of 2023 is.

Ferocious, Individualistic Surf Band 9th Wave Washes Into Alphabet City This Weekend

Although surf guitar icon Dick Dale went to the great tiki bar in the sky in 2014, his legacy of rolling thunder instrumentals lives on in Mike Rosado, frontman of 9th Wave. The Connecticut surf band have been around about half as long as Dale and have been through some lineup changes over the years, but the good news is that they survived the lockdown intact and are back playing shows again. They’re at Otto’s on Jan 7 at 9:30 PM, in between two of the most popular New York surf acts to crash onshore in the past couple of decades: the jangly Supertones, who open the night at 8, and the cinematic TarantinosNYC,, who by both talent and default have become this city’s top surf act.

When 9th Wave started out in the 90s, they had a reggae bass player and a more slinky groove. By the time they put out their 2003 album Time Tunnel, they had developed one of the most distinctive sounds in surf rock, Rosado machete-picking the low strings with his reverb turned up all the way while the rhythm section pummeled behind him and Sandy, the band’s organist and multi-instrumentalist, added roller-rink textures for a new take on a hotrod surf sound.

They haven’t put out an album since 2016 and because they go back to the cd era, not a lot of their studio material has made it to the web beyond their music page. There you’ll find Beyond Neptune – a catchy, clangy detour toward wistful 60s Britpop – and the scrambling hotrod theme Dragon Wagon 2016, along with a handful of earlier tracks. They also have a Sonichits page with a lot of live videos from the Time Tunnel era (you have to click on the play button next to each track, then click play  on the video when it comes up).

A future daily New York music blog owner took the time to catch the band several times when they were playing New York a lot. At the C-Note on February 9, 2001, they cranked out a surprisingly brief 35-minute set on a fantastic quadruplebill, sandwiched between two all-female bands, the snarky, guitar-fueled B Loud Three and the scorching twin guitar-fueled Sit N Spin, with brooding Pacific Northwest gothic band the Scholars headlining. At that show, Rosado was joined by an excellent second guitarist who shared a fixation with punchy lower-register riffage.

On February 24, they became one of the loudest bands ever to play CB’s Gallery, the mostly acoustic annex adjacent to CBGB. Their set opening for rockabilly band the Blind Pharaohs was a lot longer, and featured Sandy doing snakecharmer fills on her flute when not behind the keys and floating over Rosado’s relentless, percussive attack.

Their return to the C-Note was two days short of a year later and the absence of a second guitarist didn’t keep Rosado from churning up the sand. This time they were in the middle of a phenomenal lineup that included rising lit-rock star Ward White, a horn-fueled performance from ska band Tri-State Conspiracy at the peak of their career, future “cemetery & western” cult hero Mark Sinnis & 825, and New York Dolls-influenced punk band the Pale Imitations. The sound mix was muddy, but 9th Wave’s set list was excellent, the highlight being an amped-up version of one of their slower songs, Spy Lounge.

Inspiring true story: Rosado survived a horrific fire later in the decade to regain the use of his hands and his other limbs, and returned to play as ferociously as ever. .

A Killer Twangy Guitar Triplebill in Bushwick on the 16th, Barring the Unforeseen

New York seems to be in the very early stages of a turnover in music venues. It’s completely balkanized at this point, but there are good things happening on the ground if you look hard enough. One excellent triplebill at an unexpected spot is coming up this Nov 16 at 8 PM. A couple of rewardingly unorthodox surf bands, the Zolephants and the bracingly Middle Eastern and Greek-flavored Byzan-tones open for guitar goddess Barbara Endes’ wickedly catchy janglerock band Girls on Grass at Wonderville, a bar and video arcade at 1186 Broadway in Bushwick. Take the J to Kosciuszko St.; it’s a pass-the-bucket situation.

The Zolephants are a side project for cinematic psychedelic Americana iconoclast Ben Lee a.k.a. Baby Copperhead. In this instrumental project, Nami Coffee’s mono bass synth bolsters Lee’s twangy, judiciously layered guitar multitracks over Bill Bowen’s drums. Their 2018 cassette release Islands of Neptune is still up at Bandcamp.

The opening number, Legend of the Black Snake starts out like late 70s Can and then goes fast forward a couple of decadea, in a Phantom Surfers direction before coming full circle on a much more disquited note. The second track, Speed Demon also echoes the Phantom Surfers: you could also call it a clangier take on the haphazard sound Man or Astroman were mining in the early 90s

Seven refers to the time signature. It’s funny and surf-insider-y AF. Track four, sarcastically titled Cheesy Intro, follows a familiar chord progression and then diverges into a long, rewardingly unpredictable sequence.

Truth or Consequences is a coy bolero-beat southwestern gothic theme. Fueled by a snappy bassline, Hey! Solid Citizen balances fuzzy, sailing synth and catchy guitar jangle. The closing number, Scratch starts out as if the band are going in a moody flamenco-surf direction, but they make quasi Egyptian reggae out of it instead.

Their somewhat more traditionalist 2016 debut ep is also up at Bandcamp as a free download. The first track, Bleeding Lungs is a brisk, skittish take on a loping desert rock theme. They open Behind the Fortress slowly and expansively before taking it into edgy hash-infused rembetiko rock.

Number 9 is the most psychedelic tune here, a loopy, trippily rhythmic tune underneath a wry Beatles-inspired samples pastiche. The trio electrify an old Greek gangster theme, Black Eyes, with some gritty tremolo-picking from Lee: it’s the band’s best song, at least among the Bandcamp tracks. They close the record with a goofy, skronky miniature.

Get Your Reverb Fix This Saturday Night at Otto’s With the Surf Junkies

One of the most telling signs of how the plandemic turned New York into a second-rate artistic hub is how venues are reacting. Take Smalls jazz club, for example. For decades, they had two acts a night plus the midnight jam session. These days, the headline artist is also responsible for the jam, and where a monthly gig there used to be reserved for an elite few, bandleaders are playing two or three shows a month there now.

That paradigm works all the way down the line to Otto’s, where the monthly surf rock show used to feature as many as five acts. This month’s installment there on Nov 5 has only three. The night starts at 8 with a mystery band who call themselves Drip 2.0 and could go either way, but the groups afterward are excellent.

Headliners the TarantinosNYC, who play at 11-ish, have been around since the zeros and have evolved into a surprisingly sleek, cinematic outfit that match their name. The Surf Junkies, who play in between at around 9, just put out a debut short album, streaming at Bandcamp,

The Washington, DC quartet of guitarists Max Gonzo and Larry Atom, bassist El Kabong and drummer Vic Vegas obviously do not take themselves seriously, as befits a surf band, but their original songs are dope.

They build the opening track, The Tube, from a funky strut to a big anthemic payoff that wouldn’t be out of place in the Ronnie Earl tunebook.

The band blend subtle latin influences into the tightly wound Barrel Pounder and close the record with Surfer’s Lament, awash in spare, enigmatic, wide-angle chords over a slow clave beat.

Every surf band plays Tequila, but….do you have to record the damn thing? At least this version has more slashing guitar work than most groups give it. It’ll be interesting to see what else they have up their sleeves this Saturday night. Word to the wise: if you don’t know the club, they have an ID scanner and use it on everybody. Like, everybody: if you’re 90 and on a walker, expect to be carded. Bring your passport since ID scanners don’t work on passports, and this is no time to be leaving a trail of electronic crumbs that could wind up on a social credit score.

Darkly Propulsive, Unpredictably Cinematic Instrumentals From Under the Reefs Orchestra

One of the most enjoyably uncategorizable albums of the year is Sakurajima, the latest release from the Belgian group Under the Reefs Orchestra. The trio of guitarist Clément Nourry, saxophonist Marti Melia and drummer Jakob Warmenbol blend elements of suspense film music, horror surf, crime jazz, postrock and shadowy instrumental rock from Morphine to the Dirty Three. John Zorn’s surfier adventures also seem to be an influence.

Melia’s baritone sax alternates between melody and punchy basslines. The opening track on the album – streaming at Bandcamp – is Heliodrome. It comes across as the missing link between Friends of Dean Martinez (or Big Lazy in a slide-driven moment) and Morphine, with a careening slide guitar solo and then a propulsively smoky one from the baritone. The group join forces in an increasingly savage ride to the end.

The album’s second song, Ants, is a moody, syncopatedly vampy quasi-surf tune with a crescendo that goes from droll, to feral, to unexpectedly skronky. The trio build the album’s title track out of a steady, gloomy, Morphine-like theme to a hypnotically pulsing backdrop for Nourry’s flaring psychedelic wah-wah work and squirrelly surf riffage.

Galapagos is a cheeky, metrically tricky tropical tune with a sinister undercurrent, Nourry shifting between balmy slide and jaggedly rhythmic lines, with an elegantly baroque-tinged counterpoint as the song winds out.

How invasive is Kudzu? This is a killer plant! Warmenbol provides a suspensefully tumbling drive for a dark vamp that dissolves into dissociative psychedelia before the band get back to furtive business.

The band take a dubwise, catchy strut up to a shrieking peak in MIR and follow with the album’s big epic, Soleil Trompeur, melancholy sax wafting over spare guitar jangle. Deep down, it’s a soul ballad, with a long build to a payoff that’s too good to give away.

They close with Mendoza, an Ethiopian-tinged take on Morphine. Every single song on this record is full of surprises: this band seldom go in the direction you expect. One of the most intriguing and original albums of 2022

Minibeast Open a Dark, Gritty Twinbill in Bushwick This Sunday Night

As this blog celebrates Halloween month, there aren’t a whole lot of particularly dark shows around town coming up. But there is one on Oct 9 at 9 PM at Our Wicked Lady, where Minibeast – the latest project from Peter Prescott, of Mission of Burma and Volcano Suns – opens for the explosively theatrical A Deer A Horse, who have gone in a more grittily postrock/industrial direction lately. Like a lot of trendier venues, the club seems oblivious to #cashalways and has embraced the nickel-and-dime electronic ticketing fad. That presumably means that cash customers will have fork over $14 even at the door.

Prescott got his start behind the drumkit in Mission of Burma, so it’s no surprise how percussive Minibeast’s new album, On Ice is. Their pounding, minimalist, icily noisy posrtock brings to mind Can, Savage Republic, Mogwai and Saucerful of Secrets-era Pink Floyd. There’s surreal spoken word in places behind the steady, hard-hitting, often hypnotic forward drive of bassist Niels LaWhite and drummer Keith Seidel. The album also features sax cameos by Either/Orchestra’s Russ Gershon on a surreal, uneasily drifting, loopy organ piece and Morphine’s Dana Colley on a funkier mid-70s Can-style jam. The best song on the record is a long, undulating noiserock raga.

But more apropos to this month here is Prescott’s solo album Horror & Suspense Themes For the Hole Family, which he put out last year and is also up at Bandcamp. It has a similarly loopy quality, but there are more darkly lingering, drifty cinematic tableaux as well. Shards of reverb guitar flit into the mix or mingle with simple, forebodingly circular synth or fuzz bass riffs. One interlude sounds like an early New Order instrumental; others are more dystopically ambient. They’d make good between-song segues at the Bushwick show.

Creepy Coincidences and a Mysterious Band From Kiev

In his indispensable News From Underground feed, Mark Crispin Miller recently shared a shocking video by Hugo from Hugo Talks (scroll down toward the bottom of the page), addressing what the blunt, plainspoken podcaster calls Mass Formation Colour Programming. The barrage of blue-and-yellow color schemes is a dead giveaway, particularly since it was rolled out during the earliest days of the plandemic, more than two years before the war in Ukraine.

Remember how propaganda graphics, both physical and online, were all rolled out in sync around the world in March 2020? Hugo focuses mostly on the British and European side, but the suspicious juxtaposition of blue and yellow also existed here in the US, as you can see on the NYC mobile lethal injection bus pictured toward the end of the 12-minute clip.

As we remember from George Orwell’s 1984, Oceania was always at war with Eurasia. The war in Ukraine, and how the lockdowners foreshadowed it with these psy-op visuals, is further evidence of how the plandemic was only part of a vastly more ambitious scheme to transform the world into a computer-surveilled feudal slave state.

What appears to be happening in Ukraine is an orchestrated conflict where NATO deliberately “provoked” the corrupt and murderous Putin regime, who responded in perfectly choreographed fashion. Remember, years before the color revolution in Ukraine, Putin was badgering for NATO membership for Russia.

Unfortunately, as has so often been the case throughout history, the people of Ukraine are being murdered and imperiled simply for the misfortune of having been born on fertile and strategically valuable terrain. Just as unfortunately, because the psy-op planners have largely pivoted, from the now-flatlined Covid injection scheme, to Ukraine, there’s been an anti-Ukraine backlash in certain circles in the freedom movement. And that’s something we have to resist.

New York Music Daily was launched in August of 2011. The first album ever reviewed on this page was a hauntingly beautiful Ukrainian choral suite dedicated to the victims of Chernobyl. Which makes sense, when you consider that this blog’s owner has Ukrainian heritage.

That same year, three years before civil war broke out there, Kiev band Night Surf released what appears to be their only album, a six-track collection of instrumentals titled Light. In an even creepier coincidence, the band share a name with a 1969 Stephen King short story about the aftermath of a virus that wipes out much of the world’s population.

Other than a Bandcamp page, where the album is still available as a free download, there’s nothing about the group online in English, and there doesn’t seem to be anything in Ukrainian either. The Bandcamp page doesn’t list the names of the three women, a guitarist, bassist and drummer. So far there’s been no reply to this blog’s attempt to contact them through Bandcamp.

It’s a fascinating record, a mini-suite of sorts. The first track, Bitter, is a swaying stoner boogie number with sunbaked wah-wah raga riffage over a bubbling bassline. The second song, Suffer could be the Cure playing a Savage Republic theme circa 1984, imbued with equal parts Joy Division resignation and trebly Messer Chups surf jangle.

The band pick up the pace with an icy bass/guitar intertwine in Keep Breathin’ – a prophetic song title if there ever was one. From there they take a brief detour into a southwestern gothic theme and then Used, a striding, artfully assembled web of multitracks. The final cut is a “reverse version” of Keep Breathin’ which offers further evidence of a Savage Republic influence (remember Exodus and Sudoxe?). Let’s hope this so-far nameless trio are still with us somewhere on the globe and still making music as intriguing as this.