What the Bandcamp Daily editors are listening to right now.
Dancer
10 Songs I Hate About You
Vinyl LP
The debut full-length from Dancer is a breath of fresh air in an irony-poisoned genre as the Glasgow band’s take on blah-blah post-punk happily dispenses with the tiresome modern taste for put-on dourness and apathy in favor of energy, melody, and spark. Though never entirely anxiety-free (this type of music never is and also have you seen the news lately) 10 Songs I Hate About You is actually fun, with a scrubbed clean and shiny guitar-forward sound, a few key memorable instrumental choices, and Gemma Fleet’s characterful vocals leading the charge—quite literally, as she announces the title of each track before it starts.
–Mariana Timony
Discovery Zone
Quantum Web
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Discovery Zone aka multimedia artist JJ Weihl moves from Berlin’s Mansions & Millions label to RVNG for Quantum Web, a lovely smudging of contemporary pop, experimental electronica, and the more blissful side of ambient that’s oddly familiar to the point of being uncanny, as if it’s being broadcast from a radio station located just a step behind in time—or perhaps a step forward, it’s honestly hard to tell. Characterized throughout by a certain gentleness of tone and touch, Discovery Zone lulls you into her Web with breathy vocals and luminous electronic sounds, a combination that’s hard to resist when combined with Weihl’s objectively good pop songs.
–Mariana Timony
Michael Knott
Screaming Battle Siren
When Michael Gerard Knott died this past Tuesday at 61, he left behind a labyrinthine body of work—a seemingly infinite number of projects recorded under nearly as many different names: Lifesavers; Lifesavers Underground; The Aunt Bettys; Strung Gurus; Mike Knott; Michael Knott; Michael Moret… It is, in organizational terms, a mess. Which is fitting, because to those of us who discovered his music—a fiercely devoted group that probably numbers in the tens of thousands at best—the mess is exactly what attracted us. Michael Knott’s music is the music of imperfection, and he put all of his on ruthless display—his struggles with alcohol, his struggle to find mercy and grace, his struggle to live out the principles he believed. “Cross me once and I’ll forgive you,” he sang, “Cross me twice and it gets hard/ Cross me three times, just remember: I am no Christ/ I am no Christ.” That line comes from Knott’s 1992 masterpiece Screaming Brittle Siren, an unflinching gaze into the terrifying black abyss that is the human soul. The title of the opening track, “Miles From Shame,” sets the compass for the direction that the next hour of music will head. Above queasy guitars that pitch and roll like a stormy sea, Knott howls like a trapped animal, doubling and tripling his vocal takes and then running them just slightly out of sync with one another to create a sense of dislocation. It is the portrait of a man who is desperate to do better, but who knows he is doomed to do worse.
For those of us that loved him, that candor is what drew us in. In his inconsistencies we saw our own inconsistencies, in his messiness we saw our own mess. Michael Knott’s music was not music for people who find it easy to make the right decision—it was music for people who waged war on themselves daily. One of Siren’s bleakest songs contains just one lyric repeated over and over: “Someone draw the line.” It’s the cry of a man who needs someone else to set the parameters for him, because he knows he cannot do it on his own. After writing the liner notes for a 2021 reissue of Knott’s harrowing The Grape Prophet, he and I became something like friends, and I found that beneath the dark music was a man who was funny and charming and engaging, who battled demons but still believed in the existence of light. I loved Mike because he reminded me that people can be two diametrically opposed things at once. “I’m no captain, just a reflection of the sea,” he sings on Screaming Brittle Siren. In that reflection, some of us saw ourselves. And it made us feel a little less alone, and a little less fucked up.
–J. Edward Keyes
Leather Lung
Graveside Grin
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
Leather Lung were born to party hard. Granted, the New Englanders make up-tempo stoner metal, which is drug music by design; generally speaking, misanthropy and introversion don’t make for a particularly satisfying puff-puff-pass (unless you’re something of a hermit, in which case, you’re probably better off with some funeral doom). That Leather Lung recognize the importance of their role as hosts is evident, what with Mike Vickers’ charismatic vocals — debauched pit calls delivered in a raspy, shrieked cadence that’s somewhere between a sloshed carnival barker and a cartoon skeleton — and the band’s preference for groove and melody, as opposed to grit and misery. Energized by this Bacchanalian spirit, flanked with enough chugga-chugga riffs and mucky baselines to make any Sleep obsessess swoon, Leather Lung throw rager after rager, with “Empty Bottle Boogie,” “Big Bad Bodega Cat,” and lead single “Spit in the Casket” leaving particularly strong first impressions. Don’t threaten these gents with a good time — they’ll take you up on it, give you tinnitus, kick your ass, and stroll away with a shit-eating grin on their faces. Probably because they know that after one listen, you’ll be back for more.
–Zoe Camp
MC Juice, All Natural, Georgia Anne Muldrow
CALIsthenics prod. by Georgia Anne Muldrow
7" Vinyl, Vinyl LP
As its title implies, CALIsthentics is a predominately West Coast affair. It’s helmed by MC Juice—born in Chicago, but living in L.A.—features production from neo-soul genius Georgia Anne Muldrow (also in L.A.) and was released by Golden State Entertainment, a record label owned by—you guessed it—Bay Area basketball team Golden State Warriors. (The only exception appears to be co-headliners All Natural who are based in Chicago.) But musically, it draws on sounds from all over: an airy take on NYC boom-bap, Southern funk on the title track, synthy New Wave on “Trade-Offs.” Muldrow’s hand on the board is steady but never obtrusive: the backdrops are all laced with her trademark psychedelia, but clear enough space for the MCs, who make good use of it. On album high point “Run It Back,” driven by a chomping electric guitar, the MCs mirror the cadence of classic hip-hop tracks, among them “Warning,” “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang,” and “Black Steel In the Hour of Chaos,” tweaking the lyrics to suit the new environs. On album closer “Dreams Deferred,” a bright, jazzy arrangement masks lyrical darkness, and “Paper Thick,” featuring guest appearances from E-40, Casual, and Del the Funky Homosapien, is a rapid-fire volley of microphone one-upsmanship. Musically, it’s as sunny and breezy as the state from which its players hail.
–J. Edward Keyes
Various Artists
Nippon Psychedelic Soul 1970-1979
Vinyl LP
Back in January, Time Capsule released Nippon Acid Folk 1970-1980, an eight-track introduction to one the most fertile, fusion-rich periods in Japanese music history. (In Japanese, Nippon translates to “land of the rising sun.”) As Will Ainsley explained in his Album of the Day review, the fusion showcased on this compilation wasn’t just unique for the time; it was downright prophetic, “foreshadowing the arrivals of city pop, the psych revival (the good kind), and even folktronica.” A sister release of sorts, this week’s Nippon Psychedelic Soul 1970-1979 revisits roughly the same period (1970-1979) from different angles, more specifically, the prisms of psychedelia and soul. Choice cuts include “Haruyo Koi (Come, spring)” by Happy End, the psych-spiked prog project of Yellow Magic Orchestra member Haroumi Hosono; “Omae (You)” by Jun Fukumachi, which polishes soul and funk to a crystalline sheen; and “Hachigatsu No Inshow (August’s impression)” by Momotaro Pink, which draws connections between folk, jazz, and hard rock. Together with its folksy predecessor, it’s one of the strongest reissue projects of 2023 thus far.
–Zoe Camp
