Reviews

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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Record #890: Esben and the Witch – Wash the Sins Not Only the Face (2013)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

At this point, I should just ignore my Spotify Daily Mixes. They’re becoming financially ruinous. Almost every time I skim through one, I find something that immediately grabs my attention (see also: Life on Venus, Grivo, Locrian…).

A few weeks ago, I was looking through one of these playlists and was fascinated by the delay-heavy guitar and ethereal alto vocals of “Slow Wave,” so I dug further. What I found was an album that felt like Warpaint had been listening to a lot more goth, post rock, and black metal. Which hit my sensibilities right on the button—which in turn saw me pressing the “order now” button on a copy on Discogs.

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Record #889: Calm Collapse – Mirrored Nature (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

I say a lot of words about music. I have this blog, I write reviews for Tuned Up and the occasional other publication, I have a music podcast…at any given moment I might have two or three group chats prattling on about new releases, hidden gems, or reminders that certain records are as good as I remember.

But sometimes, all of that does a poorer job of communicating the pure essence of my reaction to a piece of music than a simple two-word reaction. In this case, “holy shit,” which escaped my dropping jaw about thirty seconds into album opener “Positive Greed.” And as the record continued on, I didn’t find much reason to refine my reaction.

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Record #888: Blankenberge – Everything (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

Everyone talks about how the internet has made the world smaller, but less attention has been given to how it has expanded microcosms into galaxies. Microgenres have become scenes unto themselves, with legions of bands offering sonic homage to a handful of albums.

Where the term “shoegaze” originally referred to a dozen or so bands around London, the sonic explorations they pioneered have created hosts of acolytes making their own pilgrimages through reverb-and-fuzz-drenched guitars. This scene has further bifurcated itself, with further microscenes forming within the context of an already niche genre (see: dreamgaze, heavy shoegaze, blackgaze, doomgaze, dreamo and more).

One of the more fascinating microscenes I’ve discovered is the Russian shoegaze scene, which is comprised of bands like Life on Venus, Pinkshinyultrablast, and Blankenberge, whose album Everything is quickly becoming a favorite of mine.

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Record #887: Brian Eno & Kevin Shields – The Weight of History / Only Once Away My Son (2018)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Very few musicians have chased the sonic concept of pure texture with as much steadfastness and fearlessness as Brian Eno. Both as a musician and producer, he is responsible for some of the most gorgeous soundscapes put to tape, practically inventing the idea of ambient music and bringing those lessons into both art punk and more mainstream pop.

But very near the top of list who might give him a run for his money is Kevin Shields, the mastermind behind My Bloody Valentine and an aural savant so consumed by his pursuit of sonic bliss that it borders on pathological (let’s be honest, it’s probably a few steps past that line).

So the mere thought of them joining forces was enough for me to purchase this without hearing a second of it—and of course, it paid off.

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