When Kyle Bates holed himself up in his Pacific Northwest apartment to record an album about isolation, grief, and personal trauma, he had no way of knowing how universal those feelings would become by its release. On the other side of lockdowns, protests, and relationships frayed by the above, Bates’ examinations are endlessly relatable—however, they still sound deeply personal, almost as if he never intended to release it.
slowcore
Record #878: Duster – Together (2022)
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.
Record #780: Low – C’Mon (2011)
On paper, slowcore giants Low don’t seem like the most obvious candidates for an Americana album. This is especially true for those of us who came to the band through the glitchy, atmospheric noise project Double Negative and worked their way backwards through their sparse soundscapes.
And while this album and Double Negative are as dissimilar to one another as anything else in the Low catalog, C’Mon delivers the same sort of minimalist compositions, just augmented by lap steels, fiddles, banjos instead of effects pedals and synthesizers.
Record #710: Circus Trees – Sakura (2019)
Among music snob circles, teenage girls are a common punching bag.
Musicians with largely young, female audiences are relentlessly mocked. The tween fangirl is a common caricature of vapid music listeners. Overly sentimental love songs are often dismissed as trying to hit the 13-19 female demo.
But if teenage girls are so lame, how can the teen sisters in Circus Trees rock so hard?
Record #569: Low – Double Negative (2018)
It’s often said that music is just organized vibrations.
Most musicians achieve that purpose by using instruments to create those vibrations. But on Low’s Double Negative, it sounds like the group is manipulating the air directly, creating a dense, otherworldly sonic landscape that is as unsettling as it is transcendent.