Our first Cool Stuff of April is here, so March is completely fucking dead to us. It almost pains me that all these truly excellent recommendations for this week’s column dropped during that dogshit of a month, but that’s not their fault. In fact, we should commend these artists for doing their part in brightening up the third worst month of the year. Good work.
Of course, when I say “brightening up”, that’s obviously half a load of shit. A good amount of music I recommend is fairly bleak. That’s certainly the case this month. Go through the list below, and if it sounds particularly ominous, I probably considered it for Coolest Album of the Week. But there’s a lot of legitimately fun stuff on the rec list this week, too. Annnnnd if I’m being honest about it, there was never a doubt in my mind who was winning Coolest this week. I connected with one album immediately and didn’t overthink it.
Come check this shit out, okay? It’sssssssss….
The Coolest Stuff of The Week | April 3rd
Mouthbreathe(r) – Knife After Death
Genres: Noise rock, punk, grunge
TIZNAO – Procesos
Genres: Math rock, post-rock, post-hardcore
AIRSOFT – NEW EYES
Genres: Punk, indie rock, emo
Soumbalgwang – 3rd Album Demo
Genres: Post-punk, indie rock, alternative
Libby Quinn – HELLZAPOPPIN
Genres: Avant-garde, post-punk, jazz, art-punk
PAPRIKA – Let’s Kill Punk
Genres: Punk, hardcore punk
10 Juin – EP Sept Titres
Genres: Punk, garage, alternative
Marie Klock – Damien est vivant
Genres: Indie pop, neofolk, synth pop
A Country Western – Life on the Lawn
Genres: Indie rock, alternative, power pop
Jackie Hayes – Mundane Pleasure
Genres: Alternative, indie rock, indie pop
Tosser – Sheer Humanity
Genres: Noise rock, post-punk, punk
L’ appel Du Vide – Metro
Genres: Gloom punk, post-punk, noise rock
LeakLeek – Leek
Genres: Punk, post-punk, math rock
Reyna Tropical – Malegría
Genres: Indie pop, Latin pop, electronic
Teens in Trouble – What’s Mine
Genres: Punk, pop-punk, indie rock
Hanno Leichtmann – Outerlands
Genres: Electronic, minimal music, electro-acoustic
Frustration – OUR DECISIONS
Genres: Punk, post-punk, coldwave
NØ MAN – Glitter and Spit
Genres: Punk, hardcore, post-hardcore
Let’s not fuck around about it, Glitter and Spit is everything punk music is about. This is, deep down to its absolute core, punk. The noise, the rage, the ethos; the history of the genre are all coiled up and shoved into a tight sub-30 minute LP of hardcore bliss.
Lead vocalist Maha Shami takes command of this album so thoroughly that I don’t want to talk about her yet. Her contributions are both too obvious to mention up front and too important not to end on. So I’ll talk first about the rest of the band, who are just as important in elevating this to the work of art it is.
At nearly every opportunity, NØ MAN makes small, unexpected musical choices throughout Glitter and Spit.
It could be anything, the tempo change at the end of lead track “Eat My Twin” or in the middle of “Poison Dart” (slowing down in “Eat My Twin”s case and subtly speeding up in “Poison Dart”s case). It could be the disturbing interlude “Eye Spy” with a child’s voice sampled over piano and an incessant kick drum before ripping into “God’s Neighborhood”. These choices happen on every song, and throughout an album, they pile up. A band starts to distinguish themselves from their peers when they can consistently surprise in these subtle, clever ways.
It’s hard to point out an individual whose musicianship stands out because that feels beside the point here. Part of what makes those little shifts in tempo really shine is how together the band feels. Everything moves in unison with each, tiny shift. None of this should be all that surprising as drummer Pat Broderick, guitarist Matt Michel and bassist Kevin Lamiell have been playing together for almost 30 years now (previously in their band Majority Rule).
At this point, they are a living, breathing, musical organism, existing as soundwaves alone. Physical manifestations of their human forms are there for our comfort only.
NØ MAN moves along a groove like few other hardcore bands can or do. Broderick blasts off with beats that both constantly move and constantly give space for the rest of the band to work their own magic. This is music with a lot of screaming and very few actual melodies, which make the riffs Michel churns out all the more important. He weaves them at the listener like an acidic spiderweb. And Lamiell’s bass feels like a horror score — I say this in the best way possible. It’s awesome, this low, ominous, blaring, warning that underpins the entire tone of the album.
Between the its musical ingenuity and Shami’s raw vocal carnage, Glitter and Spit would be dope if it were about anything.
Hell, there’s even a chance it could have made Coolest Album of the Week even if Shami screamed about some mundane shit. Honestly, she’s such a captivating vocalist and bleak, surreal lyricist that an album about random, every day musings would probably be really fucking good. Plenty of my favorite bands have made such albums in the past, and I’ve loved them, but that’s not this album.
Shami is the daughter of Palestinian refugees, and some (maybe all?) of Glitter and Spit was written after visiting family in Palestine. That these songs feel so resonant despite being written prior to Israel’s ongoing genocide only proves their importance. This isn’t prediction or fortune telling. This is Shami and NØ MAN doing what great punk bands have done since the dawn of punk — calling out real systemic injustices as they were happening. It fucking sucks that in the time between when this album was written and when it was released, it somehow became even more topical.
While this whole album is a hardcore masterpiece, the middle stretch, including “God’s Neighborhood”, “March of Ides” and “Can’t Kill Us All”, forms almost a brutalist suite of pain, fear and resistance.
This suite starts after the beforementioned “Eye Spy”, which serves to give a break between the opening trio of songs and this set. It’s a breather that’s needed because “God’s Neighborhood” takes us with Shami through the streets of her ancestral land and the horrors that take place there.
It ends with “Can’t Kill Us All”, the best song NØ MAN has ever made, and the absolute centerpiece of this album. The very first line is “Scratch their back and they’ll hatch wars”, which would be tragically prophetic if the line weren’t pulling from 70+ years of history. But what really sticks with me from this song are two lines. The question, “Will my crying mother return to the sea?” A personalization of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” And the final line, “They can’t kill us all.”
Much like how they sneak little musical moments into every song, Shami sneaks personal lyrical moments into what would otherwise be a more straightforward protest song in less skilled hands.
And I can’t help but wonder if this is why, though bleak and dire and pained, there’s always a feeling of optimism buried in these songs. I keep coming back to “They can’t kill us all.” It’s a simple line, but in the context of that song and in the context of the history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, it’s bold, proud and resistant. Clearly, the mere act of living is an act of defiance when your oppressors are literally trying to kill all of you. There’s something extremely hopeful and moving in saying they can’t.
Glitter and Spit actually matters, and it matters because it’s a great album that also happens to be about something important. It’s personal and broken and horrific and brave and even uplifting. It humanizes a perspective many people don’t want to humanize, and it does it without sacrificing any of the full range of human emotions or pulling any punches. And it does all this while weaving together one of the tightest hardcore albums I’ve ever heard.
