Seefeel emerged in the early ’90s — the kind of band that totally captures or actually creates a zeitgeist — corralling the ringing, vaporous vibe of shoegaze into the hypnotic template of trance. “Time to Find Me” off their first record is a slowgraffitti-certified song of GOAT greatness — made even groovier/sexier in a couple of oh so subtle remixes by Aphex Twin. But as Diana Vreeland used to say, I LOATHE nostalgia; lets just say the ‘feel went on to knock up the ’90s with plenty more of their trademark delirium and then vaporized for real for quite a while. Eventually founding members Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock re-surfaced sans drummer. Their latest one I think benefits from less percussion — it’s bold and unmistakably their own and less tethered to the ground than ever. Forest Swords comes to mind in the way they conjure powerful emotion within the cool constructs of electronica.
Speaking of the ’90s, which is something I honestly never do, do you guys remember a Japanese band called Melt Banana? Apparently they came out the same time as Seefeel, and — you probably know where this is going… I clearly never even checked them out and now they’re on their like ninth or thirteenth album and it’s called 3+5 and it’s pretty much exactly the high pitched, arty punky dayglo noise pop that’s been missing in my life for the past 35 years. I’d love to share some lyrics but Yasuko and Agata seem to be keeping their screechy poetry to themselves; if you can parse them please let me and the world know.
I promise you I’m really trying to get out of the ’90s, but if you’ll allow me, back in my day there always seemed to be one undisputed queen of hip hop, whether it was Latifah or Li’l Kim or Nicki Minaj, but nowadays they’re growing like mushrooms — her latest royal highness is Doechii out of Tampa— pronouns “she, her, black bitch” lol. “Doechii cooler than a fan, but she get hotter than a sauna / Take a trip out of Japan and I tsunami her vagina / Wine and dine her, Benihana / I’m the new hip-hop Madonna,” she contemplates on “Nissan Altima.” “I’m the trap Grace Jones / I don’t know what type of motherfuckin’ crack they on / I’m like Carrie Bradshaw with a back brace on / I been carrying you bitches now for way too long…” Even better is “Denial Is A River,” in which a friend offers “Okay, I just feel like this is the perfect opportunity for us to just take a second and kind off unpack what’s happened to you,” and after a bit of deflecting Doechii gets very real: “Honestly, I can’t even fucking cap / This is a really dark time for me / I’m goin’ through a lot / By a lot, you mean drugs? / Um, I wouldn’t— / Drugs? / No, it’s a— / No? / It’s a natural plant / No, I’m not judging / I’m not an addict […] I mean fuck, I like pills, I like drugs / I like gettin’ money, I like strippers, I like to fuck / I like day-drinkin’ and day parties and Hollywood / I like doin’ Hollywood shit, snort it, probably would / What can I say? The shit works, it feels good / And my self-worth’s at an all time low…”
I don’t believe we’ve properly discussed John Vanderslice… he had a groovy one last year called CRYSTALS 3.0 that combined rambly shambly acoustic stuff with digital noise attacks. I could be wrong but he seems like one of those outsider artist genius weirdos in the tradition of Roky Erikson and Daniel Johnston. He has a long and storied career that reached a peak of sorts in the late aughts with a classic, dreamy ballad called “Too Much Time.” ANYway, he’s back with a new project called Google Earth (with pal James Riotto) that actually kinda reminds me of vaporwave, but, shockingly, with some warmth at its center. Particularly on the creamy, futuristic “something complicated.” “How simply can you say…”
And have we talked about John Dwyer before? We haven’t?? He’s seriously been the hardest working man in rock since like forever, with endless iterations and tweaks to the name of his band Thee Oh Sees, currently chopped down to Osees. His schtick is basically ’60s garage rock filtered through punk and new wave, which you’d think would get tiresome, but he’s a seriously florid fountain of genius who bends his area of interest into a million different colors, shapes and sizes and probably writes an underground pop hit a day on average. I saw Thee Oh Sees at the legendary FYF Fest of 2013, and they were like this adorable rock beast with four heads, so utterly psychically connected. Dwyer fired them all shortly after that and assembled a new band before long. Some of his grooviest stuff is just him getting weird in the ’10s with a cheap old synth, under the moniker Damaged Bug. He’s made well over 30 albums and his latest one SORCS 80 is as fresh and funky and smiley-sneering as a pimply teenager. I have tried and failed to not move my glutes to “Also the Gorilla…” featuring Dwyer’s fractured sonnet “Who don’t give a fuck about the / Pretty flowers grown in the dirt / And make a point of laying around / Why don’t you make a screaming sound?”
OK, so I guess I buried the lead this month — the big AOTY contender is Peel Dream Magazine‘s soft and dreamy new collection of shimmering baubles titled Rose Main Reading Room. Main man Joe Stevens is originally from New York State and first emerged in Brooklyn (he looks very Brooklyn) but he’s in L.A. now (of course) and the album is all wistful reminiscences of NYC. Musically he picks up threads of ’90s interpretations of the ’60s (I promise I won’t bring up the ’90s again) to create ornate, lighter than air sound brocades. Is that a Stereolab “lalala” on “Wish You Well“? In which Stevens paints a vivid portrait with a bitter little word bouquet: “Netherworld destroyer, leave it at the foyer / I was sent to bore you, obviously / Get yourself a piece, a brand new kill to feast…” He then cleverly subverts the sense of the song title by adding a word to it: “I wish, I wish, I wish you were well.” Is “I Wasn’t Made for War” an obscure Belle and Sebastian B-side? With lyrics such as “I was in wait for the train to the city and / I was innately vain, what a pity and / All of the the boys on my block were the kind that want / War and glory, glory / I want you…” Come to think of it, most classic B&S songs (the Stuart Murdoch ones) were actually written in 2nd or third person. OK, digression over, the takeaway here is that RMRR is a most tingly addition to the indie dream pop rock canon.
Austinites Being Dead had one of slowgraffitti’s albums of 2023 and they’re already back with a new one that rocks equally sweet and hard. I mean full disclosure it hasn’t been released yet at press time but the four songs they’ve unveiled are all prime Angus beef for sonic carnivores. They’ve got a southern ’60s party vibe like The B52’s but they lean into the more ornate chamber pop end of that fabled decade with tightly constructed multi-part mini-extravaganzas, beaucoup harmonies and western twang. Their Spotify liner notes fall somewhere between surreal alt-comedy and trying too hard smart ass-ness, but they definitely have Texas-size confidence. “Firefighters” is a lovely reverie that doesn’t end well, or not exactly: “If I could turn back time / I’d live by the oceanside / And die by pacific waves / But I’m melting away / Angels flying side by side / a’Dorning wings make fire flies / It’s hard to die but what a treat / When you fly with angel wings / Ba-ba-ba-ba…”
Earlier this year I bestowed many a charmingly appreciative word on gothy goddess Chelsea Wolfe, and now she’s impressed me further by roping in the aforementioned reclusive genius Matthew Edward Barnes aka Forest Swords to remix “Whisper In The Echo Chamber,” with his characteristic ceremonial gravitas and vast, hollow, metallic beats. La Wolfe‘s Undone EP (an on-brand title that) features quite a lineup of high fashion producers, including Boy Harsher and Ash Koosha.
Cellophane Memories is the second collab between David Lynch and Chrystabell, a singer from Texas whom he seemingly manifested with his spooky TM-powered mind much like he seemed to do with Julee Cruise. (RIP by the way — I literally fell in love right as Floating Into The Night came out back in, well, 1990 actually… I remember creating loopy, morphing designs on a Mac SE using Aldus Freehand, sitting at my desk at the Apparel News, my brain chemistry flooded with oxytocin and dopamine, daydreaming about my San Francisco boo, whilst Julee quivered on my boombox, “Fa-aaa-aaa-ling… with youuuuuuu…”) I should probably explore and report back on Dave and Chrys‘s first record This Train but who has time these days? Suffice it to say Cellophane Memories (incidentally — crap title, I’m sorry but someone had to say it!) is lyrically very much in the Lynch and Badalamenti canon — deceptively simple, dreamy 50s-inflected songs about purest love quietly threatened by dark and menacing horror. But Chrystabell brings something rich and unusual to the sound — a layering and a degree of dissonance that put it in dialogue with the world of contemporary indie. “And now there was a feeling / A feeling of falling,” she intones on slowgraffitti favorite “The Answers to the Questions,” “She felt she would never find the answer / The answer to the questions / The questions she asked him / When he was here she thought they had a bond / An unshakable bond / But was it too good to be true / She fell into a dark dream of despair / Dark clouds roiling above in a dark wind / But then she saw him / She saw him in light / She saw him in love.”
I feel like Kurt Cobain has been haunting my Spotify. I’m usually a total derivativeness cop, but Dale Crover actually played with Nirvana (he’s best known as the drummer for the Melvins) and I mean what do you think? This one sounds eerily like Kurt using Dale‘s body to communicate from grunge heaven (minus Kurt‘s universe-bending vocal timbre of course).
And what about this one from Brooklynites Sex Week?? To be fair it has a shoegazey chorus, but, again, I smell Olympia ectoplasm…
Wow, this month in music really flew by! It’s Friday night now, somewhere, and in terms of toons to hypothetically go out to a club to, the state of the art is Australian, in the human form of Maxwell Byrne AKA 1tbsp, who puts out hyperpop-adjacent sharp and sweaty bangers aplenty, but the one that truly puts me in that fondly remembered mind-state of doing a bump and driving fast towards fun through a forest of skyscrapers is “The City Never Felt So Good.”