Reviews

Record #840: Les Discrets – Prédateurs (2017)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For most of their career, Les Discrets has been intrinsically locked with Alcest.

Both projects are pioneers in the blackgaze scene. Les Discrets bandleader Fursy and Alcest mastermind Neige played in the supergroup Amesouers (Neige has also played bass for Les Discrets on certain tours). They even shared drummer Winterhalter—who also played in Amesouers.

But when Winterhalter decided to work full-time with Alcest, Les Discrets was left without a drummer. Instead of try to replace him to write more hard-hitting, epic metal, Fursy decided to use the opportunity to change gears. And while the resulting album is a major change from earlier albums, it maintains the same delicate and beautiful balance between darkness and hope.

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Record #839: Least – Folding My Hands, Accepting Defeat (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Somewhere around 2005, I decided that emo was dead.

I had spent my formative years in devout reverence to bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, Thursday, Appleseed Cast, and Further Seems Forever.  But when the wave shifted to bands like Fall Out Boy, Anberlin, and My Chemical Romance (who, even they will tell you, were not emo), I let my attention stray from the scene and moved on to things like indie, folk, and post rock.

The last decade or so has ushered in an honest-to-goodness emo renaissance so profound it’s not even fair to call it a revival anymore, with bands all over the world resurrecting the best parts of the halcyon emo scene of yore with stunning results.

And while Florida emo outfit least may bear some superficial resemblance to the guy-linered mallcore that put such a bad taste in my mouth in the first place (some have jokingly referred to them as “Transberlin”), if any of that stuff sounded like this, I never would have retired my girl jeans in the mid-oughts.

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Record #838: Joy Divison – Substance: 1977-1980 (1988)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For as ubiquitous as they are in pop culture, it’s almost a shock to remember that they only released two studio albums. Their trademark sound, marked by melodic basslines, robotic drums, stabbing guitars, and Ian Curtis’ distinct baritone drew up most of the post punk blue print, but they also had a huge impact on new wave, goth rock, and indie rock (as nebulous as that term is, it’s impossible to listen to bands like The National, Arcade Fire, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, etc and not hear shades of Joy Division).

And while Substance is best celebrated for “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” their only Platinum single, this compilation serves as a career-spanning chronicle of one of the most important bands in pop music history.

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Record #837: Iress – Flaw (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Discovering music is too easy these days.

I remember being a blossoming music fan at the turn of the millennium, surviving off of the scraps of burned CDs from friends’ older brothers, scouring message boards for the scent of morsels buried deep beneath the underground, trudging through tectonic-slow download speeds hoping that the files I’m downloading weren’t mislabeled. Maybe if I was lucky, the hours of time I put into that single song would be good enough to bid me to get my parents to drive me to the CD store and hope that they actually had it so I could fork over as much as twenty-four bucks in the hopes that more than just that one song was good.

Compare that to the process by which I discovered Flaw by Iress. I loaded up Bandcamp, went to the “Doomgaze” tag, and clicked on the first album I didn’t already know.

It was this one, and it was glorious: a chimera of dark synths, molten guitars, plodding drums, and soulful vocals that sounded like someone accidentally hired Cult of Luna as My Brightest Diamond’s backing band, but it was too late to reschedule the studio time, so they just went for it.

Luckily, it totally works.

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Record #836: Janet Jackson – Control (1986)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Have any of the Jacksons been as unfairly treated as Janet?

Sure, Tito has been the butt of the joke since the Jackson 5 days, and La Toya has been remembered more for being the spokesperson for the Psychic Friends Network, but neither of them were ever regarded that seriously.

Janet on the other hand…Before the Super Bowl incident turned her into a punch line (and brought the term “wardrobe malfunction” into the vernacular), there was a time when Janet wasn’t just poised to live up to Michael’s star—it looked like she might pass it.

Control, her third record—and first after firing father Joe Jackson as her manager—is a massive statement that established her as a megastar in her own right, kicking off a run of five straight Number One debuts, and serves as a reminder to anyone who has diminished her place in pop culture to Nipple Gate.

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Record #835: Cloakroom – Dissolution Wave (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few bands have misrepresented themselves quite as severely as when Cloakroom described themselves as “stoner emo.” Certainly, there was no way that they could have predicted the wave of bands like Mom Jeans (and nothing like Cloakroom) that would be described as “weed emo,” but even without that confusion, there’s not much emo about what they’ve ever done. They have borne a resemblance to a certain 90s alternative band out of Champagne-Urbana, but they’ve always been much closer to HUM than Braid.

But the stoner bit…that’s never been up for debate. Extracurriculars aside, their guitars have always carried the same sort of heft as stoner metal bands like Kyuss and Sleep. But Dissolution Wave sounds the most like what I could imagine wafting out of my older brother’s bedroom carried with wisps of sage-masked pot smoke—if I had an older brother, anyway.

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Record #834: Blushing – Possessions (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Shoegaze often has a problem with valuing style over substance. The genre is primarily built on hazy aesthetics and a collection of pet sounds copped largely from My Bloody Valentine and their contemporaries. The modern shoegaze scene is filled with bands pumping out songs that wouldn’t be worth a damn without their Instagram-ready pedalboards, and the fans that support them. And I’d know: I’m one of those fans.

Luckily, Texas quartet Blushing manages to nail the Platonic ideal of the shoegaze aesthetic without skimping on fresh songwriting and composition.

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Record #833: Boris – W (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few bands are as prolific as Boris. The Japanese trio has done everything from shoegaze to synthpop to drone to thrash metal to harsh noise to garage rock to punk to hardcore to post rock to rockabilly (probably—I’m not actually sure if they’ve done any rockabilly, but probably). The sheer mass and diversity of their output makes for some great moments, but it makes it very difficult to call any of their albums essential. 

Sure, there are some legendary mile markers in their discography: most people point to Pink, I point to Noise. But for the most part, while their consistently enjoyable and impressive as a whole, most of the individual albums aren’t very distinctive from one another.

To that point, W is their twenty-seventh album—a number that doesn’t include their seemingly endless list of collaborative works. However, W feels unique enough even among Boris’s discography that it warranted adding it to my collection.

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Record #832: In Parallel – Broken Codes (2018)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

If you were looking at the resumés of the members of In Parallel to try to discern what they might sound like, you might be thrown for a loop. Sure, there might be enough shoegaze and post-punk devotion in Hopesfall and Celebrity’s catalogs that it would make sense, but you might expect Broken Codes to have some of their sharper edges as well.

But listening to the gauzy haze of guitars, drum machines, and syrupy smooth vocals, it’s hard to wish it was any grittier. This is the kind of trancelike, dreamy rock that is best consumed by letting it wash over you.

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Record #831: Iggy Pop – The Idiot (1977)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Iggy Pop lost himself for a while in the mid ’70s. His heroin addiction had proven too large a beast to manage, leading to the breakup of The Stooges in 1974. He tried his hand at a few musical ventures, auditioning to replace Jim Morrison in The Doors and to join KISS. Both were as unsuccessful as his stints in rehab.

In 1976, he reached out to his friend David Bowie, battling his own addictions, for help. The two moved in together into a Château near Paris and Bowie offered to produce an album for him. The resulting record, The Idiot, stripped away the proto-punk fury of Pop’s previous band in favor of Krautrock-influenced electronic textures—a sound that Iggy would describe as “James Brown mixed with Kraftwerk.”

In that way, The Idiot isn’t just a great record in Iggy’s catalog, but it’s also the spiritual prequel to Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy.

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