This feature is part of Bandcamp Daily’s Slept-On Week, covering records, scenes, and artists we overlooked the first time around. Today we revisit records released between 2018 and 2019. Read more here.
Qamat is-sa’atu
Unpronounceable (2018)
Even at its most minimal, the music of Moscow’s Qamat is-sa’atu—whose name translates to “The hour of resurrection from the dead has come” in Classical Arabic, according to one of the very few English-language interviews they’ve done—is still incredibly multi-faceted and rich. With vocals in Russian and Arabic and instrumentation including guitars, synths, horns, cello, and more, the heavily Middle Eastern-influenced rhythmic industrial group (they describe themselves as “post-industrial”) has been making music together for more than a dozen years. Unpronounceable, which is a collection of both old and new tracks, was put out by Berlin label Detriti Records in 2018.
-Yoni Kroll
The Submissives
Pining for aBoy (2018)
Finding this record on Bandcamp felt like finding a gold tooth while stealing pennies from a mall water fountain—like I found something special, but maybe the joke was on me.
Montréal’s anti-pop artist Deb Edison has been releasing queasy, minimal art rock under the moniker The Submissives since 2015. The music, equally hypnotic and discordant, rolls along idly adding warbly, off-kilter slide guitar embellishments to the jangly chamber-esque tunes like a tape ball collecting lint and lost treasure.
Pinning For a Boy is Edison’s third full-length release, and the record is chock-full of misanthropic love songs that sound like a disenchanted ’60s housewife crooning blissfully while vacuuming her mid-century home on quaaludes. The hooks are eerily familiar, shattered bits of Buddy Holly B-sides and Velvet Underground rarities rolly cobbled together by Andy Kaufman and Mark E. Smith. This is sinister, hilarious, heavily thematic, and catchy rock ‘n’ roll that misguidedly aims to make smoking cool again—an unfortunately lost, but possibly haunted, gilded trinket.
-Sims Hardin
Kolida Babo
Kolida Babo (2019)
Vinyl LP
The union of two Greek woodwind musicians with a penchant for electronic music, Socratis Votskos from Pella and Harris P from Athens, Kolida Babo took their name from a traditional folk ritual that takes place in Northern Greece in the lead-up to Christmas.
Their debut album was actually recorded at the beginning on the night of Kolida Babo in the winter of 2013 in one improvised live-take session. Although steeped in Greek rebetiko and Armenian folk (with the haunting sound of the duduk flute the bedrock of the album) this was roots music firmly anchored in the 21st century.
Both ancient yet modern, the group fused folk with abstract jazz and electronics, with influences ranging from Pharoah Sanders and Klaus Schulze to Jon Hassell and Brian Eno, to create a mesmerizing and spiritual sonic landscape to get lost in.
-Andy Thomas
Pororó
Por Los Dos (2019)
Pororó is a Santo Domingo-based sextet led by the composer and guitarist Arnold Martínez; they play warm, funky, Sade-inflected soft rock as filtered through the instruments and conventions of pambiche, a mid-tempo offshoot of the Domincan Republic’s famous merengue music.
Por Los Dos is a tribute to the romance between Martínez’s parents, who grace the cover, as well as the Afro-Dominican neighborhood of Villa Mella, whose special dialect the group takes its name from. The music has the serene pace and delicate tone of easy listening, but Martínez takes a lot of care to build polyrhythm-rich grooves that reward careful attention.
Take “La 3ra,” which begins with just Martínez’s voice over a bed of airy guitar strums. His melody wanders while the guitars go nowhere, as if the band was improvising. Everything gently locks into a complex, loping rhythm when the congas come into the mix a full minute in, the musical equivalent of finally seeing an object emerge from a Magic Eye poster.
“La 3ra” has the same numbered, self-effacing title scheme as almost every song on Por Los Dos, Martínez’s hints that the album should be experienced as one unbroken groove. Pororó’s idea of lovers rock, like his smiling parents on the cover, is all about being there for the long haul.
-Adesh Thapliyal
Wicked Poseur
TRANQ (2019)
While Arthur Bates might sound like the name of a bygone serial killer, it is, instead, the name of a criminally undersung killer musician. The prolific songwriter has been cutting bedroom punk tracks as Wicked Poseur for the last 15 years, superseding the egg punk craze by a stretch, and sounding much less try-hard and cookie cutter. Since the project’s conception, Wicked Poseur continuously releases well-crafted, ghoulish, hyper-infectious lo-fi punk. Tranq was Bates’s first release in four years after uprooting from Fargo and settling in Portland, Oregon. The time away culminated in the creation of one of his strongest offerings to date. TRANQ is teeming with heady, linear synth punk jams that are wholly personal, snarky and cunning, but inviting, like you’re in on the joke. The arrangements are dense, though each riff and synth line are strategically placed in their perfect place. Wicked Poseur might be off your radar, but it’s easy to fall into Bate’s deep, winding rabbit hole, and TRANQ is the perfect first step for your plunge into the Wicked-abyss.
