Reviews

Record #982: Blushing – Sugarcoat (2024)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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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Record #977: Blanket – Ceremonia (2024)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Where do you go after love at first sight? The first time I listened to Blanket’s Modern Escapism, I was head over heels. I ordered a vinyl copy before I had even finished the second track, and I listened to it on repeat for weeks.

So when I saw news of the follow up, I rushed to preorder it. But after the first couple singles, I started to hesitate. They were poppier and more straightforward, with little remnant of the crushing heaviness that drew me in the first place. In fact, I even canceled my preorder at one point, only to re-preorder it at the next single.

And boy, am I glad I did. While it certainly has a directness and pop sensibility that contrasts with Modern Escapism, the record offers a holistic look at the wide expanse of 90s alt rock filtered through modern shoegaze.

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Record #976: High on Fire – Snakes for the Divine (2010)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For all of the variety within metal and its various subgenres, perhaps no two camps are further apart than doom and thrash. Doom metal is slow and plodding, its tempo held back by the immense mass of its heaviness. Thrash, on the other hand, is brutally fast, like a motorcycle strapped with machine guns.

And at the center of this dichotomy is Matt Pike. After rising to prominence in the legendary stoner doom band Sleep, he formed the thrash project High on Fire. And while there’s still plenty of stoner metal crossover here, the tempo is a good eight times faster than anything Sleep ever did. Snakes for the Divine is a riffy, smokey record that stands up to even the thrashiest of thrash classics.

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Record #975: Meltway – Nothing is Real (2024)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

May be an image of record player and text that says 'meltway LP1 LP2'

I have no shortage of fellow music nerds sending me recommendations. But perhaps no one has the shooting average of my friend Richard. Richard and I met in a vinyl group on Facebook when I was trying to sell a Sigur Rós box set. He didn’t buy it, but he recommended me the band EF. Since then, we’ve exchanged recommendations back and forth, and he has hit far more than he has missed.

The most recent hit—and what a hit it was—was the most recent album from Danish/Norwegian shoegaze outfit Meltway, Nothing is Real, as dreamy and noisy as any record this side of the early nineties has gotten.

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Record #974: My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges (2008)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

When you’re as obsessive about music as I am, you’re constantly on the hunt. As frequently as I might buy a record though, I’m always listening to several new albums while I’m getting into the ones I end up buying. As much as my collection serves as a snapshot of what I was into at any given point in my life, a lot of what I was listening to is out of frame.

My Morning Jacket is one of those bands that has existed just outside of my financial commitment for a long time—especially this record. There were a number of times where I was actively debating between buying a copy of Evil Urges and something else, and Evil Urges never won out. That is, until a few months ago where a copy popped up at the right place at the right time and we reunited.

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Record #973: The Mountain Goats – Beat the Champ (2015)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It seems that I must continue to belabor the point that there are many, many, many blind spots in my musical perspective. I am constantly in a state of confessing my ignorance of well revered artists, drawing reactions of “what do you mean you’ve never listened to…” Usually, I remind them that I like, just got into the Cure.

The Mountain Goats is one of these bands. Despite however much I’ve heard their name thrown around by tastemakers I respect or listed alongside bands I love, I have looked at their substantial discography and passed on the massive excavation project ahead of me.

But, I’m also a massive wrestling fan. And so when my friend Josh brought the oft-heard refrain that I neeeed to listen to the Mountain Goats, he tied an extra juicy carrot to the end of that string: Beat the Champ, a folk rock album about pro wrestling. And while this sort of project could be played for humor—and there’s plenty of humor to be found—John Darnielle handles the subject with a reverence that only a true wrestling fan can muster.

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