Reviews

Record #900: Failure – Fantastic Planet (1996)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Throughout music history, there are several records that have a mismatched ratio of commercial success to lasting influence. Albums like Velvet Underground & Nico, of which it is often said that not many people listened to it, but everyone who listened to it started a band. Albums that made little impact on the larger cultural conversation but left an extinction-event-sized crater in those who heard them.

Fantastic Planet is one of those albums. It is a record that was mostly ignored upon its release, but history has reevaluated it as a revered classic.

And rightly so: thanks to its blend of HUMmy space rock, Jawboxy abrasiveness, Smashing Pumpkins guitar work, and Nirvana-esque hooks, Fantastic Planet is arguably the most concise distillation of 90s alt rock ever produced, and hits just even harder three decades later.

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Record #899: Converge – You Fail Me Redux (2004/2016)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I’ve been carrying a shameful secret: I’ve never gotten into Converge.

Barring Bloodmoon, if you count that as a Converge album (I don’t), I’ve spent precious little time with the legendary metalcore band’s catalog. However, this is entirely due to the economics of Converge vinyl, most of which sell for well over $50. It’s been far more affordable for me to just ignore them.

But recently while browsing, I spied a cheap copy of You Fail Me Redux, a remixed version of their 2004 record. I dropped the cash on reputation alone, and it’s been worth every penny.

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Record #898: The Gloria Record – The Gloria Record (1998)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I never had a job through high school—my parents said my job was to be a full-time student. Instead, I got a $ 40-a-week allowance to spend on whatever I wanted. So when I graduated high school and got around $2000 between graduation money and cashing out my childhood savings account, I spent like mad.

I blew through most of that sum by the fall, much of it buying up CDs from bands I had tangentially heard of. That included the legendary Mineral of course, but I must have heard of Chris Simpson’s side project The Gloria Record as well, because I listened to this CD all the time. 

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Record #897: Cold Gawd – God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For all of its neon atmospheres and purple-hued aesthetics, shoegaze is a little monochromatic when it comes to skin tone. The demographics of both shoegaze fans and musicians typically skew a bit more caucasian than their relative populations.

This isn’t a unique phenomenon in alternative, punk, or metal genres, and I’m not here to dissect the myriad of social issues that created it. But to my knowledge, there haven’t been too many notable exceptions in shoegaze (please correct me if I’m ignorant).

But then there’s Cold Gawd. Originally formed as a solo project of lead singer Matt Wainwright, their brand of shoegaze is as equally indebted to genre mainstays like Nothing and Slowdive as R&B artists like Solange and 90s hip hop aesthetics.

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Record #896: Another Heaven – III: The Sorrowful Cries of Birds with Singed Feathers (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

The internet has come a long way since I would spend hours scouring forums and record label sites for new bands, frantically downloading songs at the speed of dial-up, and hoping that at the end of the three-hour download, it wouldn’t be that stupid Bill Clinton impression. But if we’re being honest, having instant access to nearly every song ever recorded has brought its own problems.

That’s why it’s so helpful when a new band just plops their music right in front of you.

That’s what happened with Another Heaven (formerly post-punk outfit Hollow Boys) who dropped a track onto the r/shoegaze subreddit a couple years ago with a promise that they were working on an album. I saved the post, but forgot about it until a few weeks ago. And when I went looking for said album, I found three. The most recent (and fully formed) of these was this—a collection of heavy, sludgy shoegaze songs about the apocalypse. You know, the exact stuff I’m into.

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Record #895: Dead Poetic – Four Wall Blackmail (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I still have a clear memory of the day I bought this CD. I was in ninth grade, and my stepdad took me to the mall to buy me some new music—a purpose that I almost certainly overstepped. Among the CDs I plucked from the wall display were The Moon Is Down, Crash Rickshaw’s self titled, and Four Wall Blackmail, the debut from Dead Poetic.

As clearly as I remember that day, though, I can’t remember what it was that made me pick this record up. I had a habit of scouring record labels’ websites in those days, so I certainly had seen the band featured. I don’t remember if I heard a single on a comp or seen a music video.

But I do remember that the first time I remember seeing the term “emocore” was in a review for this record. Obviously, this is hardly the first album that could be described as such—it missed that mark by over a decade. But in my personal journey, this served as an entry point to the idea that the heartfelt melodies of emo and the powerful frenzy of hardcore could exist side by side—an idea that would inform much of my musical tastes as a teenager.

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Record #894: Birds in Row – Gris Klein (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Our relationship with music is often discussed in quite shallow terms. Words like “enjoy” or “like” do little to express the full nuance of how music can make us feel. In fact, the assumption that music is meant to simply be enjoyed or liked is an inadequate lens that can impede how the artists intended us to interact with it.

For example, I’m not sure I enjoy this record. The first time I heard it, there was very little about it that I liked at all. In fact, after scanning through it the first time, the most accurate word for my reaction was probably disgust. But over the next week or so, I found myself returning to it several times, swirling it in my ears like wine in a glass trying to discern the exact reaction I was having.

And I couldn’t stop. Whether I liked the record or not, it got its barbed claws under my flesh and embedded itself there. I’m still not sure I’d say I enjoy this record—but I’m a little more sure that it doesn’t mean for me to.

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Record #893: The Bell & The Hammer – The Things We Get Wrong (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Around nine years ago, I met Dan and Serenity Johnson at my church’s Super Bowl party—which I will admit is not a place I typically expect to meet interesting people. But as the weeks went on and I got to know them better, I was surprised at the breadth of Dan’s encyclopedic knowledge of music history, which the couple combined with an incredible talent with their project The Bell & The Hammer and their 2010 record To Set Things Right. 

Shortly after releasing that collection though, their musical ambitions were set aside as they transitioned into parenthood. But as I’ve remained close with Dan through the years, he constantly shared bits of songs they were working on, and this past year, those songs finally found release in their sophomore record, The Things We Get Wrong. And let me just tell you. This record makes me feel honored to count them among my friends, because personal connection or not, this is a masterpiece.

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Record #892: Chat Pile – God’s Country (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Chat Pile doesn’t sound like it would sound very good on paper: sludge punk guitars, 80s-style drum production, and scuzzy bass lines ripping beneath spoken-word diatribes about systemic poverty, grief, critiques of organized religion, and drug-induced hallucinations of Grimace, the McDonald’s character, smoking weed.

To be honest, I’m not sure it sounds that good off of paper either. There’s not much here that sounds beautiful by conventional standards.

But for all its ugliness, there is a power here that cuts through its lack of listenability and lack of hooks and grasps your attention anyway. And if you let it take you, you’re in for quite a ride.

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Record #891: Dream Unending – Song of Salvation (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It’s often said that music is a transcendent art—that it exceeds the sum of its parts, reaching beyond the mundane circumstances of our day to day. But if we’re being honest, an awful lot of music falls short of that promise. If I’m skimming the radio, there’s very little that might inspire even a shift in my mood, let alone an altered state of consciousness.

But every once in a while I’ll find a record that reminds me just how much power music has. A record that stretches my imagination beyond its usual limits and peels back the corners of the fabric of reality, even for just a moment. And if are once again being honest, a lot of musicians think this is what they’re doing, only to mire themselves in woo-woo pastiche and tired cliches.

In the case of Dream Unending’s sophomore record Song of Salvation though, those traps are avoided, in favor of long-form progressive death-doom metal that transcends not only its genre but its ambitions.

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