Rex Tycoon – Cash Reward
Rex Tycoon have been shambling around Pittsburgh with their hands in their pockets since 2019. The quartet waxes rueful about boredom, coffee, cigarettes, and life’s daily spirals. Their latest EP, Cash Reward, feels like a morning-after affair; the preceding event could be a bar crawl, a difficult conversation, or even just a late night in front of the TV, but there’s a loopy, dazed quality to the music that embodies the feeling of squinting into the sun and thinking, “damn.”
Frontman Austin Reesman sing-talks with a wry sense of humor, dropping self- deprecating gems—“Nobody can lose like me / It’s something I’ve perfected,” (“Milk”) and “In my head I was shot down dead / And you just stood there on your phone / Scrolling as I bled” (“See You Tonight”)—like loose change. The guitar chords on opener “On and On” mimic the womp womp sound effect that accompanies failure, and the hangdog harmonies on the title track sound like Buddy Holly and The Crickets took downers. The distillation of the EP’s shoulder-shrug ennui is closer “Milk,” a rework of a track from the band’s first demo, caffeinated in both tempo and subject matter. Reesman sits at the table with a significant other and sings, “Been putting milk in my coffee lately / What’s new with you?”; a subtle but affecting snapshot of a fading relationship. Cash Reward is perfect music for when life feels less than spit-shined.
Wasted Space – Anyway, Anyway, Anyway…
Wasted Space’s latest album, Anyway, Anyway, Anyway…, is tough to listen to, and even tougher to write about. It’s not that it doesn’t sound good—the quartet plays tight, searing rock music that splits the difference between righteous punk rage (the union-strong, boss-stomping beatdown of “Kick It”) and raw emo throb (the raggedly melodic “No Worriez”). Demolition derby drums set a frenetic pace, guitars zigzag like lightning bolts, and vocalist/bassist Michaela Doorjamb delivers lines that alternately soar and serrate. It’s the lyrics—handled mostly by Doorjamb—that elevate the experience from exhilarating to heart-wrenching.
Take the tempestuous, waltzing lament of “Fence Cutters,” which addresses a person lost to despair. It begins, “The boys wear suits buttoned up to their necks so they can’t cry / As they bear you down the aisle of the church you once attended before you died,” and ends with, “I wish you’d called me / You’re gone and I was wrong / I thought that you were better.” Or the epic, slow-rising crush of album closer “Drumhed,” which features couplets both poetic (“So you stay up making anagrams of their names / Like canyons and cantos, sing sonatas all the same”) and grotesque (“I’m crashing cars while people pass / I’m eating pebbles and drinking gas”). You don’t so much listen to Anyway, Anyway, Anyway… as bear witness to it.
Merce Lemon – Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild
Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild (Darling Recordings), Merce Lemon’s first album since 2020’s Moonth, envelops like a cocoon. Moonth was also insular, but playful, a recording made in a blanket fort with a cadre of imaginary friends. Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild uses a warm country toolkit—smoldering chords at the fore with hints of piano, pedal steel, banjo, and fiddle around the edges—to build a gestational realm removed from the rest of the world.
Transformation is ever-present, be it human-to-animal (“I’ve been eating like the birds / So maybe I’ll grow wings,” from swaying opener “Birdseed,” or “I’m tying our tails / In a slip knot,” from the crunching, cloudy-skied “Slipknot”) or human-to-nothing (“The skin is peeling away,” from the dissociated acoustic dirge “Window”). Lemon has a knack for cracking and breaking her voice to fit a song’s emotional contours. She can go from vulnerable to dreamy to insistent in the span of just a few lines. Her lyrics function as blurred Polaroids full of fractured detail; they’re especially evocative on the delicately resonant “Rain” (“I can see your relentlessness / In the muddy puddles / Where retting is”) and the sparkling reverie “Blueberry Heaven” (“You can call this heaven / Because all the money is buried deep below our feet”), the latter of which sees a fake-out ending bloom into a thicket of cascading banjo and keening harmonica. The closing title track’s bowed cymbals, coupled with Lemon’s repeated musing, “The thoughts of a husband / Weighing on me,” come in like gusts of wind, threatening to blow away the reflective chamber that Lemon has created. Cocoons, the gathering hiss seems to warn, don’t last forever.
