Month: April 2024

Record #980: Moodring – Stargazer (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

We all knew the nu-metal revival was inevitable. As soon as I started seeing Gen Z wearing wide-legged pants with fishnet tops, I knew it was dangerously close.

But I didn’t expect that it would come out of the shoegaze scene—or that I would be so into it.

Not that it got its hooks in me right away. When I first listened to this record—recommended to me after I got into Blanket—I got to the second or third track before turning it off. But after Loathe, vein.fm, and Fleshwater softened my initial resistance, I gave Stargazer another listen. And this time, it got me, and it got me good.

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Record #979: Frail Body – Artificial Bouquet (2024)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Last night, driving back from a trip to view the eclipse, I apologized and told my wife I had to listen to something loud to keep me awake. I threw on this record, having not been able to give it a full listen since receiving my copy. A couple songs in, she joked, “I don’t know why you thought I wouldn’t enjoy this.” Then, she asked why I did.

It put me in an odd state of self-reflection. Ten years ago, I never would have expected that I would not only endure listening to a full record this abrasive, nevermind enjoy it. Sunbather had widened my tastes up to heavy music, but even bits of that record were too much for me. Even as recently as two years ago, I would caveat my enjoyment of bands like envy, Boneflower and Chalk Hands with the disclaimer “I don’t usually like screamo, but…”

Recently, I’ve learned how incorrect that disclaimer actually is, and just in time for Frail Body to release an absolute masterpiece of the genre.

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Record #978: Fleshwater – We’re Not Here to be Loved (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Over the years, an awful lot of digital ink has been spilled debating the question of whether or not Deftones are numetal. For a while, it seemed that the consensus was “No, they’re not numetal because they are good.” However, since Covid broke, it seems that there has been a group of young bands offering a rebuttal: “Yes, Deftones is numetal, and that is what makes them good.”

One of these acts is Fleshwater, featuring three members of metalcore outfit vein.fm, themselves no strangers to numetal adjacency (their newest record even has a turntablist). And while their walls of fuzzy guitars and laid back vocals have definite influences in shoegaze and space rock, their riffs are rife with both the heaviness and grooviness that dominated the JNCOs clad sounds of the turn of the millennium.

And, uh, it kinda rules?

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