From The Headphones — Six Organs Of Admittance, Beak>, Belong, Bangladeafy, Thou
To whom it may interest,
Final week of May 2024. The month’s obligations didn’t leave much time to peruse and engage too much by way of new albums and singles. That said, Summer is pretty much here, so some time should free up. Here are some songs and records to check out:
Six Organs Of Admittance
Time Is Glass
Released: 4/26/24
Drag City
Link to the review at No Ripcord.
Beak>
>>>>
Released: 5/28/24
Temporary Residence Ltd. / Invada
The unexpected release of Beak>’s newest album, >>>>, cancelled out most of my attention for other planned listening. With nary a single out there generating any buzz, the sudden availability of this fourth LP from the trio (Geoff Barrow, Billy Fuller, and Will Young) was a strategic move, the slow extraction and dissemination of singles from the album seen as potentially weakening its impact if not considered as a full and complete work.
Honestly, they’re not wrong. I was happy not to be spoiled.
Motorik proclivities intact, Beak>’s latest exhibits some seamless and excellently sequenced song transitions, quality low end, and an entrancing level of layered detail. How and when they decide to dial up their intensity is neither predictable or overbearing. I think of “Denim” specifically, when a quieted metronomic bridge shifts into a chugging, howl-adorned third act.
I imagine within the utopian nighttime dreamworld of a kosmische musik enthusiast there would’ve existed an opportunity for Can to collaborate with Slint and compose an album like >>>> that plays to both their strengths: the endless possibilities of sonic mutation within irregular drum patterns and the haunting near-melodic vocals with which most of these songs contain. One exception to this observation, however, is the excellent “Hungry Are We”, some near-CSN&Y vocal harmonizing, lightly ethereal and beautifully isolated, overtop some gorgeous bass/guitar interplay.
And since I invoked the hallowed sounds of Can, “Ah Yeh” sounds like something the late Damo Suzuki was meant to sing on, a perpetual funky drum loop and undulating keyboard phrases that adorn the propulsion beneath.
This album has been on a loop since its 5/28 release date.
Links:
Beak> — Bandcamp / Facebook / X (formerly Twitter)
Temporary Residence Ltd. — Order link
Invada — Order link
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Rarely Unable:
Beak> surprise release their first album in six years, aptly titled >>>> out on all formats via Invada and Temporary Residence Ltd today.
"At its core we always wanted it to be head music (music for the ‘heads’, not headphone music), listened to as an album, not as individual songs. This is why we are releasing this album with no singles or promo tracks."
The band continues, "the recording and writing initially began in a house called Pen Y Bryn in Talsarnau, Wales in the fall out from the weirdness of the Covid days. Remote and with only ourselves and the view of Portmeirion in the distance we got to work."
"With the opening track, "Strawberry Line" (our tribute to our dear furry friend Alfie Barrow, who appears on the album's cover) as the metronomic guide for the album, we then resumed recording, as before, at Invada studios in Bristol, whilst still touring around Europe and North/South America."
"After playing hundreds of gigs and festivals over the years we felt that touring had started to influence our writing to the point we weren’t sure who we were anymore. So we decided to go back to the origins of where we were at on our first album. With zero expectations and just playing together in a room." - Beak>
Following a 13 year break, Belong have released two singles from the duo’s upcoming new album, Realistic IX, which is releasing 8/9 via kranky records, “Souvenir” and “Image of Love.”
For “Souvenir,” their brand of industro-gaze evokes immediate (and admittedly lazy) reference to the vocal gloss of Loveless, though the discernible guitar sound and propulsion anchor the atmospherics really well. The muscular low end nearly buries the vocals. “Image of Love” is a pleasant, floating instrumental composed of a programmed beat and a breathy, tonal haze.
Links:
Belong — Bandcamp / Facebook
kranky Records — Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Rarely Unable:
Realistic IX, the third full-length by the duo of Michael Jones and Turk Dietrich, aka Belong, is both an expansion and excavation of their signature acid-washed songcraft. Bleached guitars, metronomic drums, and buried voices rev, swirl, and seethe across shifting gradients of haze and hypnosis, alternately driving and diffuse. Melodies surge closer to the surface, flexing their form before resubmerging into quickening currents of feedback. Elsewhere the elements dissipate into a dusk of murk and microtonalities, electricity liberated back into infinite night.
Although it’s been 13 years since Belong’s prior kranky offering, Common Era, none of the duo’s rare synergy has decayed in the interim. Jones and Dietrich’s commitment to oblique states of motorik drone and liminal emotion continues to evolve and unfold, increasingly tactile and unreal, an alluring glow glimpsed through fogged windows at witching hours.
Realistic IX will be released via kranky on 9th August. Tracks "Souvenir" and "Image Of Love" are out now.
The jagged and frantic noise duo Bangladeafy (members Jon Ehlers and Atif Haq) have a new album coming out this June titled Vulture. Having apparently subbed bass for harsh synths, “Pastures” carries the math-centric intensity of Hella or Lightning Bolt, albeit with the corroded saw-teeth of the duo’s sole melodic element.
Vulture is out on 6/21 via Nefarious Industries.
Links:
Bangladeafy — Bandcamp / Instagram / Facebook
Nefarious Industries — Bandcamp /‚Facebook / Instagram / X (formerly Twitter) / YouTube
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Nefarious Industries:
After wowing the underground for years with its prog-punk shredding (what one VICE writer described as “Lightning Bolt and The Melvins eating big, greedy spoonfuls of each other’s candy-colored vomit”), the NYC duo replaced bass guitar with synths and began moving toward its next form.
On new album Vulture, Jon Ehlers and Atif Haq – whose sensorineural hearing loss and Bangladeshi heritage, respectively, provide the basis for the band name – mash chaotic rhythms, euphoric hooks, and plenty of existential horror into songs that teeter between panic and ecstasy. Reference points include Devo, Skinny Puppy, The Locust, Dan Deacon, and Nihiloxica.
Fecking Bahamas describes BANGLADEAFY's new track, “Pastures,” as “an angry screed of poetry with sparse, dislocated drums and some pretty radical synth stabs.”
Speaking on his hearing disability, Ehlers states: “I’ve certainly faced criticism, or murmurings that I might not have what it takes to hang with the big dogs, so to speak, because there’s a limit to what a hearing disabled musician might be able to do. If anything, I feel that I've proved myself and have worked harder to get there.”
Vulture drops June 21st and will be available in limited edition CD and Cassette formats. A NYC record release show is booked for June 26th at Brooklyn Made with special guests Trip Villain, Trace Amount, and AFK.
This entire album is in the red.
Umbilical is Thou’s latest release, a ten-tonne swamp-encrusted assemblage of aural shrapnel that’s been working to collapse my ears since the album’s 5/31 release date. While I’m not convinced that Umbilical surpasses the decibel-laden height of 2018’s Magus, it’s interesting to hear Thou remove themselves a bit from their signature slow and immersive acid-bath of a burn.
The full album can be sampled via the visualizer below:
Links:
Thou — Bandcamp / Instagram
Sacred Bones — Order link
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of another/side:
Thou has always been a force of raw energy and unapologetic dissent, defying easy categorization and challenging listeners to confront the complexities of existence. Today they release their crushing new album Umbilical on Sacred Bones. It’s their firmest nod to the raw intensity of obscure '90s DIY hardcore punk. It’s a record filled with mosh-ready riffs, heavy breakdowns and scathing vocals. The band’s aesthetic and political impulses have always been punk and like anyone embroiled in the subculture Thou have been exploring what it means to exist within and without a rigid morality. That exploration takes thematic center on Umbilical and their self-assessment is as harsh as that of the world around them.
“They've called us anarchists, criminals, foreign meddlers, lunatics, dispossessed, relativists, utilitarians, egoists, passion maximizers, ascetics, negators of everything. Clearly, the ‘Thou’ experiment is never going to appeal to audiences who demand that art rigorously enforce a coherent and righteous worldview.
And yet, are we not ourselves constrained by our own rigid morality? In those quiet moments of deep contemplation, when the bargains and concessions are thoroughly examined, when we yield before the Judging Eye—what is the summation of our choices? If the unspoiled self beyond the immensity of time were given voice, what pronouncements would be made? What would such an internal audit yield? What undeniable character would be revealed?
This record is for the radicals, the crackpots, the exiles who have escaped the wasteland of capitulation. This record is for the militants and zealots refusing to surrender to comforts, to practicalities, to thirty pieces of silver. And this record is most especially for the weaklings and malingerers, burdened by capricious indulgence, hunched by the deep wounds of compromise, shuffling in limp approximation, desperately reaching back towards integrity and conviction.”
- Thou
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
