Wild Garden – A Growing Chorus
Keyboardist Dustin Stuppy, bassist Braden Ashe, and drummer Mark Carlisle prove themselves to be master shapeshifters on A Growing Chorus, the trio’s debut as Wild Garden. Over the course of the album’s eight instrumental tracks, the three musicians evoke a range of styles and locales with understated elegance.
While Stuppy has previously melded disparate sounds with his synth-tinged solo project, Vacancy, A Growing Chorus owes more to jazz than it does electronica. The traditional trio setup acts here as a springboard rather than a tether. Even the most straightforward tracks contain unusual accents; ghostly whistles underpin the chin-in-hand reverie “I Hope It Rains,” and corner-table closer “Spiral” features disorienting rhythmic interplay between piano and bass. Zoom out on the map, and you’ll find “Hey!,” whose clicking castanets and sauntering violin (courtesy of Heather Pinson) suggest candlelit Granadan caves and sun-drenched Tarantine weddings alike, “Mister Brown,” which enlists clarinetist Breanna Wong for a spot-on music hall flounce, and “Low Tide,” a spirited surf track that whips up waves while Stuppy hangs ten at the edge of his keyboard. It’s not just the differences between songs that stand out, but the differences within them. “A Minor Fizz” moves from an insolent strut to a tight funk groove, and “Keep Going South” cycles like Reich-ian train wheels before breaking into a raucous cha-cha. None of the decisions feel show-offy, though, just joyful and colorful, like the wildest of gardens.
Underneath – It Exists Between Us
At first glance, it seems strange that Underneath chose to end their punishing new album, It Exists Between Us, with a warped snippet of America’s “Ventura Highway.” Listen to Dewey Bunnell sing, “Tell me, how long you’re gonna stay here, Joe?”, though, and it starts to make sense. Understood in the context of the existentialist brutality that the metal quintet has unleashed, “here” is the world, and “Joe” is all of us.
Underneath does not render the experience of human existence in particularly rosy tones. Vocalist Joey Phillips roars, howls, and groans like a person on his knees before the vast and uncaring void itself, issuing condemnations while his bandmates punctuate his words with vicious, world-annihilating blows. “The Mountain” gnashes teeth made of broken continental plates, “Alabaster Yellow”s climactic breakdown swashbuckles ghoulishly, and the roiling “Habsburg Jaw” drops a doom riff that curls like weed smoke from a volcano. While Phillips takes furious aim at religion (“Hell has a face / And it’s mean / And it walks hand in hand with your God,” from “Habsburg Jaw”), the Lost Cause (“You made your choice / I’ll make mine / As you watch your antebellum die,” from the John Brown-note chug of “Finishing Reconstruction”), and Second Amendment over-compensators (“I need fucking power / I can’t feel my cock,” from the caustic “A Gun the Size of a Building”), he rejects purely nihilistic anger. On the album’s closing one-two punch—the thrashy “It Exists Between Us” and the epic, funereal “It Dies Within Us”—Phillips exudes a weary stoicism (“Have you ever considered / That God wants us to hurt”) that borders on transcendence (“Hollow, you’re fucking hollow / And this hole inside will never fill / Outward, now you look outward / To the only thing that’s fucking real”). The message: Give up on yourself—at least your rigid idea of yourself—and you might find some peace here, Joe.
Leek Lone– WHO?
Leek Lone's new release, an “audiobook” called WHO?, begins with the sound of a chattering crowd. It’s distant, a bit muffled, like the sounds that populate YouTube’s liminal “next room over” playlists. Appropriate, because Leek Lone's music, recorded and mixed at home, has always possessed a shut-door quality. It’s just him and the instrumental having a conversation in a low-lit booth at the edge of the world.
On WHO?’s opening title track, Leek Lone—backed by a gossamer, FLOUSEN-produced pulse— positions himself as an “audio gardener,” “sowing the seeds in pockets / the instrumental the soil.” He carefully works his plots of earth over the course of the audiobook’s seven tracks, using husky, sing-song flows and reflective wordplay to explore the crevices of unorthodox beats. Yujin’s work on “SOLITAIRE (feat. King Quad)” sounds like a breeze blowing through a chime-filled water garden, B0nds’ keyboard runs on “DIATRIBE” recall the creativity of a child at his first piano lesson, and and Leek himself layers cooing vocal samples over reversed cymbals on “SINCERELY,” haunting accompaniments to his admission, “See my heart heavy / Lay it down and crack the pavement.” BLCKNGHBR’s phrasing is as inventive as his ear for production. (Leek goes by BLCKNGHBR when he acts as producer, too.)
He prophetically recalls hip-hop history on the off-kilter “UNCONDITIONALLY” (“As the no-name’s voice rings louder in the court / You will recognize the greatest, ain’t seen this as just a sport / Kool Herc declared liberation cutting in the park / It was light that August night which illuminated the dark”), and drops an utterly beautiful passage during the warm, gentle “RELATIVE”: “Look at how time is aging you / In more ways than one / Is you on meter or slightly behind the drum / I’ve ended and begun / Ain’t no dying with the sun / The red giant hums / From the rebirths to come.” Leek Lone may be “solo dolo” with his mic, but he’s got the universe in mind.
