Notes From The Record Room: Bob Dylan, FACS, SUMAC & Moor Mother, The Jesus Lizard, Golem Mécanique
Record Room: Monday, 1/20 (Martin Luther King Jr. Day / Inauguration Day)
Quick note: This is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s day. The president can eat shit.
To whom it may interest,
Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan released Blood On The Tracks, his fifteenth LP. For me, Dylan is an artist whose stock I can appreciate without myself having retained a consistent level of invested interest, a figure whose regal acclaim is likely something you had to be there to fully grasp. I’ve absorbed my copies of Blonde On Blonde, Highway ‘61 Revisited countless times alongside greatest hits comps and 21st century albums like Modern Times and Rough And Rowdy Ways (whose album cover still rates as visually shitty enough to offend anyone with a working set of eyes). Dylan’s cultural impact is not lost on me.
I’m well aware that genius moments like The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, among other notable albums from the same era, wouldn’t exist without him. It happens that "All Along The Watchtower,” one of the best songs Jimi Hendrix recorded, is a Dylan song. He set the singer/songwriter bar, cementing himself as a paradigm of the pen: Understood.
Blood On The Tracks, though, is an album I listened to frequently when I’d acquired it in the early 2000s, a reliable soundtrack for my daily commute that warranted calm in those post-graduate days early in my graphic design career when the 8 hours that followed clock-in would be spent in a state of high-caffeinated disillusionment and boredom. For Dylan, Blood On The Tracks was an emotional purge, one that, to my ears, didn’t sound as weighed down by self-indulgence and hefty poetic nuance as his previous and perhaps better known works. I believe that that’s why, out of every album of his that I’ve listened to over decades of incidental and intentional exposure, this is the Dylan album that has continued to resonate with me.
“Tangled Up In Blue,” “Simple Twist Of Fate,” “Idiot Wind,” and “Shelter From The Storm” are Blood On The Tracks’s best-known offerings, though “Meet Me In The Morning” was always my favorite track on the album: A comfortable bass riff set to mid-tempo, Dylan sparing himself the need to inject every available inch of song space with multisyllabic descriptors. It’s serene. As I’m revisiting the album now, “Meet Me In The Morning” still stands as its best inclusion in my mind.
FACS
Wish Defense
Trouble In Mind Records
Scheduled to release: 2/7/25
For as much as I try to avoid words like “angular” when describing bands whose guitar strings certainly bend that way, “You Future,” the latest FACS single to surface from their upcoming new album, Wish Defense, bares the sharp melodic corners and light rhythmic chug that satisfy the term. Falling somewhere between the sporadic sing-talk of The Fall and the loose, No Wave-jamming of DNA, “You Future” is lyrically minimal, its initial act relatively locked-in until more than midway through when the tempo slows and frustration creeps in, strings pulled into howling sustain or relentlessly scrubbed.
My interest in Wish Defense was sparked thanks to the single “Desire Path”. “You Future” has only enhanced said interest, so I’m looking forward to hearing the full album.
Wish Defense is the last album to be recorded and engineered by the late Steve Albini, a distinction both notable and unfortunate as his much-celebrated and seminal catalogue of albums has now seen its final installment. As Albini was only two-days into the session before his passing, the work was completed and mixed by Sanford Parker and John Congleton.
Wish Defense is scheduled to release 2/7/25 via Trouble In Mind Records.
Links:
FACS. — Instagram / Bandcamp
Trouble In Mind Records — Instagram / Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of another/side:
With their sixth studio album Wish Defense (incoming Februrary 7, 2025 on Trouble In Mind Records), Chicago trio FACS take a good, long look in the mirror to face themselves. FACS’ Brian Case notes that the album's lyrical content revolves around doppelgängers or “doubles,” tackling the idea of facing yourself and observing your ideas and motivations.
“Are you the same as you were?” they ask on “You Future,” FACS’ latest single and Wish Defense album closer. Case shares: “The final track is also the final action, look in the mirror and ask the questions. It’s a future self talking to a ‘you’ from the past, assessing the path up until this point, questioning who you are. We bookended the album with the two songs that felt the most vulnerable and I think that really works with this idea of examining and challenging who you are and the perception of who you are.”
Wish Defense is also the last album engineered by Steve Albini. Two days were recorded at Electrical Audio in early May of 2024 before Steve’s untimely passing, with renowned engineer and friend Sanford Parker stepping in to finish the session 24 hours later, tracking the last bits of vocals and overdubs. Longtime collaborator John Congleton mixed the album as Albini would have, in Electrical Audio’s A room, off the tape, using Albini’s notes about the session.
On Wish Defense, the return of FACS original member Jonathan Van Herik— who stepped away from the group just before their debut album Negative Houses was released, and replacing longtime bassist Alianna Kalaba— brings renewed vigor and a marked angularity from the band’s more recent output. The songs still hit hard, but the approach is sideways; the roles have changed since Van Herik’s original tenure and his previous time with Case and powerhouse drummer Noah Leger in Disappears; now on bass, Van Herik was originally the group’s guitar player and features on the debut, while current guitarist Brian Case played bass. This role reversal has helped the band’s dynamic, offering up a different musical perspective than before, now revisiting the trio’s long-going collaboration with some distance and time.
SUMAC & Moor Mother
The Film
Thrill Jockey
Scheduled to release: 4/25/25
Following the release of The Healer, which was 2024’s excellent four-song colossus by SUMAC (Aaron Turner, Nick Yacyshyn, Brian Cook), a two-track cassette of Healer remixes titled The Keeper's Tongue was issued that featured rework from Moor Mother, performer, activist, poet, and the vocal presence behind the turbulent jazz quintet, Irreversible Entanglements. As one whose fanboy inclinations often dictate my reaction to collaborations like these, this specific partnering, one whose parts are composed of two presences who dominate within their respective fields of creative practice, immediately drew me in and provoked curiosity about future endeavors for this team-up.
Cue The Film, a fully-realized recording of said team-up, and “Scene 1,” its first released single.
Photo credit: Paulo Gonzales
As both SUMAC and Moor Mother (a.k.a. Camae Ayewa) have built their work and identities around intensity and improvisation, “Scene 1” demonstrates how well this combo works; the trio’s generated hypnotic drones, hammered accents cutting through a mire of dissonance, acting backdrop to Moor Mother’s naturally commanding presence and emphatic vocal delivery. This dynamic is not too dissimilar from other Moor Mother performances from that standpoint, citing the maelstrom of freeform sounds performed by Irreversible Entanglements, or even the sonic mayhem composed for her own solo performances, often acting in support of the executed verses.
That said, I don’t believe that “Scene 1” fully exhibits SUMAC’s normal brand of severity, so I’m expecting that the volume will increase and that the full breadth of this promising conspiracy of aural assault will be revealed as The Film progresses.
The Great Bailout, an historically centered concept record about British colonialism was released by Moor Mother in March of 2024 with an expanded edition issued later that July.
Links:
SUMAC — Instagram / Bandcamp
Moor Mother — Instagram / Bandcamp
Thrill Jockey — Official / Instagram / Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Rarely Unable:
The Film is a singular work between SUMAC – a band that uses the volume, distortion, and guitar-centric approach of metal to make music that has the malleability of jazz and textural exploration of noise – and the visionary award-winning avant-jazz poet, scholar, activist, and punk rocker Moor Mother. Guitarist/song-writer Aaron Turner, Nick Yacyshyn writing on synth and drums, and primordial bassist Brian Cook as SUMAC, had visions of working with Moor Mother– across the liminal, gossamer thin barrier of space time, Moor Mother had the same idea. At Studio Litho where the record was recorded with engineer/mixer Scott Evans, she laid down the vocals, her words written to the sparse, yet dense and entropic sonic miasma SUMAC conjured for her.
The Film draws from the group’s more strained, airier moments as well as their more improvisational aspects; the stark, industrial entrancing rhythms and chaos are amplified with radio-signal static and washy swells. For her part, Moor Mother’s prescient omnipotence that anchors projects like her free jazz band Irreversible Entanglements or even her hardcore punk records like Moor Jewelry’s True Opera is mirrored by her presence here. In the cinematic dreamspace invoked by SUMAC and Moor Mother, through futurist vocal manipulations and heavy metal, the truth is finally out there.
The
Jesus Lizard
“Westside” Single
Ipecac Recordings
Released: 1/22/25
In 2024, The Jesus Lizard broke a 26-year absence of recorded material with Rack, the band’s reputed pigfuckery and gleeful penchant for the perverse fully intact, positioning The Jesus Lizard for a successful comeback and a tour series riddled with sold-out dates.*
Photo credit: JB Wilkins
Since then, two non-album singles have been released: “Cost Of Living,” which came out in November of 2024, and “Westside,” the latest to surface as a digital single.
Shades of 1991’s Goat and 1992’s Liar are immediately apparent, Duane Denison’s unmistakable scratched and scoured tone locked into the David Wm. Sims / Mac McNeilly pulse. Vocalist David Yow sounds eerie here, his fondness for shouted stanzas or choked utterances supplanted with melodic intensity. There is a moment at the bridge where the song takes a more melodic turn, some beautified respite from the band’s otherwise serrated mode.
*I had the privilege of seeing them perform during this tour and the fact that they’re all well into their 60th decade and still able to fuck with an audience and melt their faces has helped me be less fearful of getting old.
Links:
The Jesus Lizard — Instagram / Bandcamp
Ipecac Recordings — Official / Instagram / Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Speakeasy:
The Jesus Lizard kicks off the next round of their U.S. tour this May, with the seminal band visiting the West Coast on the latest leg of their Racktour. Ahead of the trek, the foursome has released a new standalone single, “Westside” their second post-Rack track.
“’Westside’ goes along with the previous single, ‘Cost of Living,’” Duane Denison explains, “which was subconsciously influenced by Leonard Bernstein’s ‘West Side Story’ and hence the name. Really.”
David Yow adds: “There is a part in ‘Westside’ where the lyrics say, ‘… give him back his arm.’ That was inspired by David Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway,’ when Robert Blake’s character says, ‘Give me back my phone.’”
The band recently wrapped up sold-out tours across the Eastern U.S. and the U.K., earning rave reviews. The Guardian called their performances a “growling, spit-flecked fusion of pummeling songs and acerbic wit,” while Mojo described the band “as titanium-tough and gimlet-sharp as ever.” WXPN simply summed it up as “absolutely feral.”
Golem
Mécanique
Siamo tutti in pericolo
Ideologic Organ
Scheduled to release: 3/14/25
As a recovering Catholic, I’m well-associated with the solemn air of the devotional.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, likely best-known for directing the extremely controversial film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, an unflinching and ultraviolet critique of fascism based on the writings of Marquis de Sade, was viciously beaten and tortured to death in 1975 on a beach in Ostia, which is outside of Rome. Though someone did own up to the murder, the confession was later retracted.
Siamo tutti in pericolo, the upcoming new album from Golem Mécanique—the sobriquet of singer/sound artist Karen Jebane—takes its name from Pasolini’s last transcribed quote from an interview. The phrase translates to:
“““““““We are all in danger.”””””””
“La notte” is the album’s opening track. Steeped in a meditative hum, Jebane’s vocals have the air of ritualistic prayer, addressing a somber occasion set in an audibly cavernous environment, or presumed place of worship. The harmonizing is lovely, this eulogy paid to an artist whose natural predisposition toward questioning, challenging, and shocking establishments and institutions into accusations of blasphemy or obscenity perhaps disqualified him from being given a respectful sendoff.
As Jebane herself noted, “I just wanted his body not to lay alone on that cold beach.”
Links:
Golem Mécanique — Instagram / Bandcamp
Ideologic Organ — Official / Instagram / Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Rarely Unable:
The last words that poet and visionary film director Pier Paolo Pasolini said in his final interview were “Siamo tutti in pericolo”; translated: we are all in danger. Pasolini was then brutally murdered on a beach in Italy, a case which is still cold today.
On this album, named after the man’s final public words, Golem Mecanique loses herself on that same Italian beach alongside his body and translates her observations and mourning into a devastating musical landscape. Siamo tutti in pericolo will be released via Stephen O'Malley's Ideologic Organ label on 14th March.
Siamo tutti in pericolo is dangerous, conveying the darkness and uneasy nature of both the art Pasolini created when he was alive and the circumstances of his murder. In her early teens, Golem taped the Pasolini film Accatone when it was shown on television and watched it the next day after school. In her words, “it was an earthquake!”, immediately leaving a great impression on her as it was unlike anything she had ever seen before. She describes the feeling she has when watching a Pasolini film as “silent violence” — a cold and radical response which calls into question her beliefs about the behaviour of people and lies and truth. She hopes to evoke this feeling with her music — a melding of beauty and dread.
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
