Record #987: 84 Tigers – Time in the Lighthouse (2022)

I’m not reviewing records for other sites quite as much these days, but when I did, it was often a huge exercise in self control to not buy ever record I listened to. It’s still a mystery to me how I would decide to buy some records but not others, but it was not a foolproof system, and sometimes I erred.

One of the more grievous errors was to not buy Time in the Lighthouse, the debut of Michigan post-hardcore 84 Tigers, an act whose members’ resumes include Small Brown Bike and Swellers. In fact, I bought this record only after re-reading my own glowing review.

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Record #985: Benton Falls – Guilt Beats Hate (2003)

Very few releases had as profound an impact on my teenaged music tastes than Deep Elm Records’ Emo Is Awesome, Emo is Evil, Vol 1. And few tracks on that compilation had the impact of Benton Falls “Angel on Hiatus,” a shapeshifting track that traverses the full spectrum of emo’s moods and dynamics with a powerful climax.

But like many of the bands discovered through that comp (see also: The Appleseed Cast), I didn’t dive too deeply into the records that provided those tracks. While many of the songs from Guilt Beats Hate ended up on various emo mix CD-Rs, it’s taken me until just now to buy a proper copy. The record has lost none of its potency though.

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Record #983: Narrow/Arrow – Asbestos Weak Hood (2021)

Gimmicks are a tricky thing to do right. Most of the time, when a band has A Thing™, eventually their music starts serving the gimmick rather than the other way around (ex., Billy Joel, whose late-80s output was a pursuit for what would make the best music video). And honestly, it would be really easy to categorize Narrow/Arrow as a gimmick band and move on. Guitarist/vocalist Cody Nicolas usually plays two guitars simultaneously and every single one of their song titles is a pun.

And yet, they manage to escape all the trappings of their own gimmicks by offering earnestly moving songs and musicianship that’s impressive without ever being flashy. While Narrow/Arrow has been offering up a satisfying mixture of math rock and Midwest emo since their inception, they’ve never sounded more impressive—or more at ease—than on Asbestos Weak Hood.

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Record #982: Blushing – Sugarcoat (2024)

The last two times I’ve reviewed a Blushing record, I talked a lot about the tightrope that shoegaze acts have to walk between capturing the archetypal early 90s sounds of the genre and finding their own voice. By their third full length, Blushing walks this balance so deftly that mentioning it would be a moot point.

Sugarcoat offers up the same sweet, dreamy songcraft that the group has made their career on, but there’s a palpable confidence here. They’re even more fluent, and the vocabulary sounds more comfortable in their mouths.

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Record #981: ††† – Goodnight, God Bless, I Love U, Delete. (2023)

One of my favorite subgenres is Chino Moreno side project.

For all the praise he gets as a metal vocalist, the Deftones frontman has made a considerable amount of noise across the years about how his musical center is actually pretty far from metal, preferring acts like The Cure, Depeche Mode, Cocteau Twins, and the like.

This push and pull of Chino’s more melodic sensibilities to the band’s heaviness is a big part of what makes Deftones so compelling, but there’s something special that happens when he leaves his bandmates to experiment with other sounds. In fact, my own path to the Deftones started with Palms, his project with former Isis members.

But usually, these side projects are one offs. Until last year when his project Crosses released a completely delicious follow up.

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Record #980: Moodring – Stargazer (2022)

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)

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)

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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