Let me admit I was on my shit this week. It’s a punk-adjacent-heavy week. And when it’s not some punk-off-shoot genre, it’s something dark and/or weird. No random singer-songwriter this week. No beautiful folk acts. None of it. We’re back to basics and getting wild.
A good portion of the list was finalist for Coolest Album of The Week. While I had a shorter list this time around, it’s super fuckin’ strong, so to have so many albums still emerge from that ether as the strongest of a particularly strong group, I feel like that means a lot. We have an especially dope group of finalists here.
Rider/Horse, of course, won it all. Teens was probably the runner up with their noisy but catchy post-punk. Wild Powwers hit like a modern day Velocity Girl. Pascagoula pulls us into their filth. Hypnodrone Ensemble is beautiful, weird and spacey. Try PALMAR DE TROYA because they’re fun.
All the finalists are marked * next to the band and album name. If you have a lesser known band or label you think fits my taste, email me at pizzafriendsrc at gmail.com and I’ll check it out (but due to the volume of emails, I probably won’t respond even if I liked your band — nothing personal!).
But that’s enough of all that bullshit, let’s dive into…
The Coolest Stuff of The Week | July 10th
Bennu Is A Heron – despite the world is so big, but not a corner belongs to me
Genres: Punk, experimental, hardcore punk
Wild Powwers – Pop Hits & Total Bummers Vol.5 *
Genres: Rock, glam, grunge
Vangas – Slow Strum b/w Rushing
Genres: Noise rock, punk, rock
Saphileaum – Mirage
Genres: Ambient, electronic, downtempo
Borla – Kordoba Bidea
Genres: Post-punk, indie rock, alternative
Teens – S/T *
Genres: Post-punk, indie rock, noise rock
Bacchae – Next Time
Genres: Punk, post-punk, synth punk
Rhinestone Pickup Truck – Self Deprecation At Hourly Rates
Genres: Indie rock, garage rock, power-pop
Pascagoula – For Self Defence *
Genres: Noise rock, hardcore punk, sludge
Twisted Teens – TOURTAPE
Genres: Post-punk, folk-punk, garage rock
Germain Guilbault / Post Bad S.CDE – Germain Guilbault / Post Bad S.CDE – Split
Genres: Experimental, rock, noise
Hypnodrone Ensemble – The Problem Is In The Sender – Do Not Tamper With The Receiver *
Genres: Experimental, post-rock, krautrock
Danny Scott Lane – Caput
Genres: Electronic, minimalism, ambient jazz
Blind Girls – An Exit Exists
Genres: Hardcore punk, screamo, post-hardcore
PALMAR DE TROYA – II *
Genres: Noise rock, post-punk, punk
Interlay – Hunting Jacket
Genres: Post-punk, garage rock, grunge
Rider/Horse – Matted
Genres: Experimental, post-punk, noise rock
Prophecies and incantations. The unsettling bellowing of a doomsayer screeching at us from the pulpit. But instead of a choir and organist, something more fitting: unsettling bass, seething, worming, often squealing apocalyptical guitars and the battering of drums, pounding from the depths of our psyche.
With Matted, Rider/Horse have crafted the perfect, ominous post-punk album to soundtrack the ongoing collapse of America.
If there is hope to be found in vocalist/guitarist Corey Plump’s unhinged but carefully worded rants, I don’t hear any. Not a single carefree or uplifting riff is played or chord is struck by Plump or pedal steel guitarist Zoots Houston. And Jared Ashdown’s bass sounds like pure doom at times. This is all by design, creating an abrasive but alluring soundscape that draws the listener into the fever-dreamish hell world posited by Rider/Horse across these eleven tracks.
Very little of this music is what you would call beautiful, but an ethereal quality underpins each song, balancing out the discordant chaos. Even the slower songs on Matted, the ones that other bands would lean into as the pretty songs, Rider/Horse fills with noise and disturbing, subdued vocal takes. This is reminiscent of Liars’ self-titled album’s closing song “Protection”, which takes a would-be gorgeous piece of nostalgia and flips it into something sinister with a classic creepy Angus Andrew vocal delivery. On the slower tracks, Plump takes on a similar languid drawl to Andrew that provides a spectacular counterpoint to the yelping sing-shout vocals of the faster joints.
The vibe all adds up to the memory of a memory of a broken down roadside church, crumbling in some forgotten part of America.
Rider/Horse, as a whole, embodies the kinds of preachers and drugged out makeshift congregations Craig Finn spat about on Separation Sunday. But instead of telling us stories of the characters who would go to those churches and the things they would do, the prophecies they would hear, the band speaks to us directly. We become the characters. We hear the prophecies. We become part of the stories and the music takes the place of the disorienting swirl of psychedelics and youth. Matted goes beyond “show — don’t tell” in story telling. It takes the ethos of “don’t show or tell — become”.
Any fun to be had here comes from the sometimes sputtering, sometimes rolling drum grooves courtesy of Chris Turco and the pace of the songs themselves.
I was listening to Matted in the car with my five year old the other day. Although she has dreams of being a drummer, she’s never attempted to fake-drum along to any song before. Mostly, she just bangs on stuff loudly and gets mad at me when I try to teach her about rhythm. But on this day, she drummed along by her own volition, and she listened when I gave my little lesson with this album as an example.
This is undoubtedly because Turco’s drumming is magnetic. Whether pushing the tempo on the majority of these tracks or carefully establishing a mood, his presence is constantly felt and needed. The album has an incredibly brisk pace, its 35 minute runtime flying by in a whirlwind. A lot of that credit can go to Turco and his ability to both keep things moving and provide connective tissue between each of these breathless tracks.
Matted is a rare album where the individual parts are spectacular, yet I still feel compelled to say the sum is greater than its parts.
While that’s true to some extent of almost every album I pick for Coolest Album of The Week, I mean this to an ungodly extent. It goes beyond four musicians playing the fuck out of their instruments and making something great. That happens a lot. Each song contributes to the greater whole, too. Each moment. Each weird noise and feedback. Every arrangement choice. The song structures. Every little part adds up to something that is greater than itself, a cohesive vision from four madmen.
