What an especially odd week of music this turned out to be. We had a particularly experimental batch, and the deal with experiments is they can have a wide range of outcomes. Most of those outcomes seemed to be annoying the piss out of me specifically, so my list is shorter than usual this week.
That said, I wanna be clear about two things. First thing is the music appearing on this list is stuff I fully stand behind and did not in any way annoy the piss out of me. But the second thing is that even when music annoys me, if the annoyance is because the artist is trying new, daring things and it just doesn’t work for me, who cares? Keep going for it. Maybe it worked for someone else. Maybe it’ll work better next time. Just don’t be bland. That’s the worst crime of all.
Lucky for us, we have some decidedly not bland recs below, and some absolutely killer finalists for Coolest Album of The Week. Obviously, Michal Gutman won, and we’ll get to her fantastic album later. Poppycock (from The Fall/Blue Orchid’s Una Baines) is a genre-bending punk-adjacent project that was closest to upsetting the top spot. Also in consideration as finalists were noise rock bands IPANAZAR and PANIKATAX, who both spell their band names in all caps, for whatever that’s worth.
But trust me, there’s a lot of other fun and experimental music if you wanna step inside and check out…
The Coolest Stuff of The Week | May 29th
KORASEK – bialowieza
Genres: Post-hardcore punk, noise rock, post-metal
phoanøgramma & Luca Ferro – limen memoriae
Genres: Musique concrete, avant-garde, experimental
Girl and Girl – Call A Doctor
Genres: Garage rock, punk, alternative
Slow Fiction – Crush
Genres: Garage rock, punk, indie rock
Jim Haynes – Inadvertent
Genres: Avant-garde, experimental, classical
IPANAZAR – Skin Hunger
Genres: Noise rock, post-grunge, post-rock
PANIKATAX – A Sudden And Unpleasant Change
Genres: Punk, noise rock, stoner rock
Pardoner – Paranoid in Hell
Genres: Punk, hardcore punk, indie rock
Frédéric D. Oberland / Grégory Dargent / Tony Elieh / Wassim Halal – SIHR
Genres: Experimental, electronic, avant-garde
drunk uncle – O, brittle weather!
Genres: Indie rock, math rock, emo
La Luz – News of the Universe
Genres: Indie rock, indie pop, rock
Likvideringsenhed – Dansk dødsindustri 2
Genres: Experimental, electronic, industrial
Poppycock – Magic Mothers
Genres: Post-punk, punk, alternative
Michal Gutman – Never Coming Home
Genres: Post-punk, post-rock, alternative
Never Coming Home opens sounding like a lost alternative radio single from the 90s or early 2000s but the lead song quickly detours and disassembles, revealing pathways leading the listener away from those areas of comfort. By the very next song, a half-spoken word, pitch-shifted nightmare, the affair gets extremely weird. Yeah, there’s no comfort here.
Not since Poe’s Haunted, have I heard an album straddle the line between fragile and confrontational so aptly.
While their singing voices aren’t all that similar, the way their arrangements serve to soundtrack their voices are. Michal Gutman has a way with knowing when to keep things sparse and when to overload a composition, and what effect that has on her incredible vocals. She has a traditional folk singer’s tongue and cadence but post-modern sensibilities, a dichotomy that gives each song the flare of a kind of performance art beyond mere music.
A pulse runs through each of these songs, a groove. I can’t speak to how Never Coming Home was actually made, but these songs are at least performed lived as a one woman show using a loop station. That can speak for a lot of why these songs are the way they are, all for the better.
When the arrangements are at their fullest, the looping parts layer on top of each other, creating an intricate sonic collage.
Gutman’s bass is always at the center of each arrangement, often forming several layers and parts, swirling together and against each other at one time before the songs morph or layers die off. These songs change so much depending on which piece is allowed to reveal itself at any time. They’ll shift between beautiful and discordant and back again with the subtle layering of the loops, their pulsations and prodding pushing the mood of each song.
Even on the sparser songs, the bass is the centerpiece behind Gutman’s vocals, sometimes the two starkly alone together, comfortable partners. These songs are where the album truly shines, as much as I adore the sneer and bravado of the fuller, oftener heavier tracks, because we get to feel all the aspects of Michal Gutman’s songwriting unfold slower. These songs let us linger on each painstaking moment and tortured vocal. We get to experience each part of the song come at us and then peel away so we can identify every layer individually.
However, it’s the constant push and pull between starkness and full that makes this album great.
Within even the most packed songs, there are moments of brittle bareness that Gutman bursts from in a streak of noise. In the starkest of songs, clever accents stumble through. And even these songs aren’t afraid of throwing on a few layers and getting relatively loud. Each song, and the entire album, toys with this balance as a matter of principle.
The end result of all of this is something that feels carefully constructed yet also feels like it’s about to come unwound at any moment. It’s as if she’s made this beautiful object and is now threatening to smash it to pieces. That’s the beautifully unhinged quality of Michal Gutman’s art, a musical glass cannon.
