I have a working theory that in any piece of music, most lay listeners primarily hear the vocals. The strongest case for this idea was at Furnace Fest ’21, where the “dream-thrash” band Astronoid, a band known for their blistering riffs, fiery solos, and blastbeats galore were booked on the stage reserved for the quieter bands.
But even so, Radiant Bloom might stand to challenge even those listeners, as Astronoid offers up the most brutal instrumental performance of their career.
Allow me to introduce you to my friend Jack.
Around thirteen years ago, I met Jack as part of a group of local artists, musicians, and poets trying to build a more substantial creative community here in South Bend. I’m not sure how old he was at the time—in my mind, he couldn’t have been older than fifteen, always dressed like someone’s dad in ragged sweaters and giant glasses. At that point, his band Merchant Ships had already broken up, so when I found out a few years later that they had a pretty decent following online, it messed with my brain a bit.
In the years since, he’s helmed a number of projects, from William Bonney to Knola to Midwest Pen Pals, all offering various shades of intense emo. That is, until he took on the moniker of Boy Rex which offered a more intimate brand of folk rock. So intimate in fact that after a few releases, he felt it was more genuine to go by his given name instead.
And while this, his first record billed as Jack M. Senff, is a for all practical purposes a continuation of the Boy Rex project, there’s another level of introspection that can’t be explained entirely by the name change.
2004 was a different time, man. Asymmetrical haircuts were flatironed in the front and hairsprayed in the back for maximum volume. Lopsided liprings and bandanas (or, briefly, surgical masks) were must-have accessories for off-center t-shirts and jeans that couldn’t be tighter if they were painted on. It all looked ridiculous in public, of course, but it didn’t matter: it was all constructed to look best from the MySpace Angle™, which was the ultimate arbiter of clout.
I Am Hollywood probably isn’t the Most Scene record of that era, but its chaotic genre-hopping and anything-goes grab bag of pop culture references is perhaps the most emblematic record for the hyperactive attention deficit of the early 2000s scene.
It’s hard to tell whether social media and streaming have been a net positive or negative for music in general. On the one hand, anyone with an internet connection and the most basic recording setup can distribute their music onto the internet within minutes. But on the other hand, it’s relegated musicians to the roles of Content Creators, requiring them to keep releasing a constant stream of new music to keep their audience’s attention.
But somehow, Holy Fawn has more or less managed to escape that trap. Their 2018 full-length Death Spells still feels as fresh and hype-worthy as it did when it first exploded across the internet. There were some other releases in their catalog—a 2015 EP that no one really paid attention to (myself until recently), a three-track EP in early 2020, and a couple remixes and covers, but Death Spells has remained the standard bearer for the band—and the entire heavy, moody shoegaze scene since, it seems .
I say all of this to point out that we didn’t need another Holy Fawn record. But damn, am I glad we got it, because Dimensional Bleed is proof that the Arizona quartet can conjure lightning to strike at least twice.
Sometimes, a record doesn’t need to have high aspirations to be great. It doesn’t need to redefine the boundaries of genre or have some intricate narrative thread. It doesn’t need to offer up some transcendent experience to the listeners.
Sometimes, it just needs to be really, really catchy.
And that’s about the best way I can think to describe this record from Curtail, an Akron quartet made up of emo veterans that delivers effortlessly infectious tunes that isn’t quite emo, but isn’t quite not emo either.
There’s an old quote that goes something like, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” I generally disagree with that maxim—given the amount of time I spend doing just that. But sometimes, it hits the bullseye of my inadequacies. And when it comes to describing Brutus, that bullseye is a mile wide.
Because in truth, no matter how precisely I could parse the formulas behind the Belgian power trio’s genre-fusing alchemy (something like, two parts hardcore, one part shoegaze, one part shoegaze, a pinch of blackgaze, sprinkle pop sensibilities to taste), it would be utterly useless compared to actually listening to it.
I’ll admit it right now—when Sweden’s Blindside first captured the attention of America’s disaffected youth (groups) with A Thought Crushed My Mind, I wasn’t that impressed. I had several friends who were absolutely obsessed (particularly with the manic refrain of “I’M A VAMPIRE!” from “King of the Closet”) but it didn’t do anything for me. Which is odd, considering that 1) they were the undisputed third member of a trinity that also included Project 86 and P.O.D.—two of the bands that got me to care about music in the first place—and 2) I most certainly wouldn’t have “known better.”
But a few years later, while watching the skateboarding film Grind, I was entranced by a band performing during a competition scene. I did some digging and realized that this was the same Blindside that did the goofy vampire song. Everything about it entranced me. I even asked my amateur stylist girlfriend for the lead singer’s haircut (we didn’t quite get it). I tracked down a copy of both Silence and the following album About a Burning Fire and wore them out. And I’m not afraid to confess that I rebought CD copies of each as recently as last year.
And I’ll further own up to the fact that I spent exactly zero seconds deliberating over this reissue—bizarre new cover art aside. And though I expected to enjoy “Pitiful” and a couple other tracks and cringe through the deep cuts, I found it far more consistent than I remembered it being.
For the life of me, I don’t understand why it’s taken me almost twenty years from falling in love with this record to purchasing it. As a punk kid coming into college spinning emo, hardcore, and metalcore, Bell & Sebastian felt woefully uncool. Hushed, bookish folk songs about college sexcapades, chronic fatigue syndrome, and complicated relationships with local veterans don’t exactly hit the same way as, say, Sunny Day Real Estate, mewithoutYou, or Norma Jean.
But something about Stuart Murdoch’s sardonic wit and the understated whimsy of the arrangements embedded itself in my flesh like a fishhook, and no amount of too-cool punk attitude could pull it out.
In a day and age where anyone with a smartphone can record an album themselves and distribute it around the world for free, it’s easy to forget the depths of obscurity that the cult bands of yesteryear trudged through.
Take for instance the slowcore outfit Duster, whose two full lengths in 1999 and 2000 received very little attention at the time. But with the emergence of social media and streaming, the few devoted fans of those records started finding each other and spread the word of Duster like gospel. The cult grew so much that eighteen years later, the band reunited, reissuing those two LPs and writing new ones.
And they haven’t missed a beat. Together, their second record since resurrecting, finds the band playing their personal brand of spaced-out, hazy slowcore with so much conviction that you might expect them to have been released twenty years ago.
I don’t remember the events that led to me acquiring this CD as a seventeen year old. I don’t know if there was a music video I saw or a friend who grabbed me by the lapels and forced me to listen to it. Maybe I just saw the psychedelic album art and a band name I recognized and bought it blind.
In either case, this album of mystical, vaguely funky alt-rock managed to capture my attention when I was up to my ears with bands like Thrice, Thursday, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Fugazi. And now, eighteen years later, it still holds up.