Idents by Julia Schimautz, collage by Emma Shore
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 2021 and 2022. Read more here.
Bobby Would
World Wide World (2021)
On his second LP, World Wide World, released in 2021 on Low Company, Bobby Would works from a bedroom dream pop template to create lush, fragile, deeply affecting cosmic dirges. The album is a largely melancholy affair, marked by icy, deadpan vocals muffled with delay and distortion. Yet Would, who also spends time in Itchy Bugger and warped art-punk gang Heavy Metal, has a remarkable knack for chiming guitar melodies and sly, earworm hooks that shine bright in the gloaming. Suggesting the Clean as if beamed from another galaxy, songs such as “Maybe You Would” and “So to Say” have a ramshackle bounce that offers a beguiling counterpoint to the album’s more desolate material. Even during its more pensive moments, though, World Wide World has an expansive, widescreen beauty. Would casts a line into the night sky and drags the whole universe to the ground, distilling it into lo-fi pop music. It’s a remarkable feat not to be overlooked.
-Nate Knaebel
Sugar Wounds
Calico Dreams (2021)
Heavy music has a tendency to be rigid in its structures; the countless subgenres, the pedantic genre wars, the goofy elitism all too common. Yet that’s exactly why when transgressed, it has the potential for something beautiful. Deafheaven’s glossy black metal, Discordance Axis’ Evangelion-inspired grindcore, and Gospel’s prog skramz are all boundary-less and excellent, and its in this lineage that Sugar Wounds’ Calico Dreams lives.
It’s easy to zero in on how Calico Dreams separates itself from typical skramz records, but beneath all the reverb and tremolo lies the same allure as all the aforementioned bands: sickass riffs. Not a moment goes by where Sugar Wounds doesn’t bombard you with an explosion of soul-affirming guitar lines. Calico Dreams exists at the intersection of angelicism and mayhem.
-Eli Schoop
Memorial
Live in Tskhinval 1979 (2022)
There’s an entire forgotten history of rock ‘n’ roll in the Soviet Union. The USSR’s state-controlled record label (and only label) Melodiya was selective about its output, releasing mostly classical music and a few popular records from the West. DIY scenes were completely ignored by the scribes, which makes Memorial’s Live in Tskhinval 1979 an important addition to the record. Starting as an offshoot of South Ossetian band Bonværon, Memorial pivoted away from the previous group’s repertoire of Soviet pop and Ossetian folk and dabbled in the more experimental sounds of bleeding-edge free jazz and progressive rock. This singular document of Memorial’s existence is raw and low fidelity, captured on a home tape recorder, but its value as a piece of history is crystal clear.
-Shy Thompson
Teresa Bright
Blue Skies (2022)
Vinyl LP
Teresa Bright is one of Hawaiʻi’s most celebrated singers. Ever since her debut album Catching a Wave, she’s been shaping the musical identity of the islands for decades. She’s done everything—popular songs from Hawaiʻi, the mainland, and even folk music from abroad—and has enshrined many of her original compositions into the canon. In 2005, she put her uniquely sultry voice to a run of jazz standards, backed by all-star musicians—but she and her engineer Kit Ebersbach decided to shelve the album, waiting for an appropriate time to release it. Fifteen years later, the Hawaiʻi Academy of Recording Arts was preparing to honor her with a lifetime achievement award; the moment finally felt right. With Blue Skies finally out in the world, Bright makes a strong case for why she deserves the accolades.
