Genital Shame – Chronic Illness Wish
There was only one black metal album released this year that namechecked a RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant, and that album was February’s Chronic Illness Wish (The Garrote), the debut LP from Genital Shame, a one-woman, home-recorded project masterminded by multi-instrumentalist Erin Dawson. Dawson takes knowing digs at the notoriously finnicky black metal scene, both through her self-described, tongue-in-cheek microgenre (TWBM, for Transwoman Black Metal) and through her unconventional musical choices. Sure, there are blast beat drums and distorted tremolo picks and bloodcurdling screams, but, frequently, the drums slow down for agile rolls (“Schooled In Every Grace”) or violent waltzes (“Chronic Illness Wish”), the guitars veer into ecstatic, towering major keys (“Become Someone Specific”), and the vocals echo faintly, like the shrieks of wraiths; on the glowing-ember synth piece “Hermaphroditic Image,” Dawson’s sporadic rasps sound like they’re being blown across the surface of an ocean. Funny enough, the aforementioned RuPaul track, closer “I Met Kerri Colby,” is the album’s most traditional offering.
If you enjoyed Chronic Illness Wish, you might also enjoy: Calamitous Manifestation of Flesh by Wretched Fixation, Cadavre Exquis: Faces of the Drawn and Quartered Moon by Eyes In Darkness Without Form
Ex Pilots – Motel Cable
A variation on a classic riddle: If a shoegaze-adjacent album drops in Pittsburgh, and Ethan Oliva isn’t singing, drumming, or shredding on it, did the album actually drop? It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the fact remains that Oliva plays in a bunch of bands: Barlow, Gaadge, Sober Clones, and, finally, Ex Pilots, who in August released Motel Cable (Smoking Room), a collection of fuzzy gems that feel just out of reach. The album’s lyrics are cryptic, almost impressionist, and you can tell they’re grasping at something deeply personal. Take, for example, the first few lines from opener “Downdraft,” which splits the difference between thrashing riffs and sweet, planet-orbiting melodies: “I turn around from you at the side / Your head in the termites / Red water holds you down.” Vocal effects further establish the sense of distance. Oliva’s voice sounds like it’s coming through a shortwave radio tuned to some mysterious, faintly-familiar rock station. Appropriate, because the songs contain refrains that feel like they’ve been stuck, half-forgotten, in the back of your head for years, especially the swooning serenade “Hannah,” the biting “Silver Sword,” and the moody, acoustic “Starry.” And then there are the guitars. They whoosh and zip and roar like jet engines blasting off to a distant horizon.
If you enjoyed Motel Cable, you might also enjoy: Drugs of the Sun by Blinder, Zin Hound by Zin Hound
Mento Fellini – Temptation Babylon
Cindy Lee wasn’t the only artist to release a non-streamable monolith of a double album this year. In May, Mento Fellini’s Temptation Babylon appeared in the form of a single Google Drive download, then in June as a two-hour YouTube file, circumventing the music industry blob that Fellini condemns on the album’s second track, a brittle, punky waltz called “The Gatekeeper.” Don’t let the homespun grain fool you into thinking the album was a toss-off; these songs were crafted with obvious care and pinpoint attention to detail. Decades of musical forms are pulled into Temptation Babylon’s offbeat outsider orbit and reconfigured in its image. Fellini filters yearning Motown soul through a flip-phone (“(Give Me) Just One Good Reason”), detunes scrabbling me-and-Julio folk, (“Penicillin Hotline”), spikes Wings-esque rock balladry with disorienting reversed notes (“The Dollar & Christ”), conjures bombastic synth psychedelia befitting a LEGO version of The Wall (“Until You Fall”), muddies flickering disco (“Leave My Dreams”), shades slick yacht music with clouds of vocal harmony (“Temptation Babylon”), sticks a mutant barbershop quartet into a pop-punk ripper (“Pick-Up Game”), and cranks out about ten effortless power-pop tracks. There’s also a four-part odyssey (“Escape Into the Fantasy”) that includes extended string and organ passages, because why not. Fellini’s sadsack yelp delivers hook after hook, drawing from a seemingly bottomless well. Who needs Spotify, right?
If you enjoyed Temptation Babylon, you might also enjoy: No Arc by Rave Ami, LOVE by Coke Belda
Derek White – Direct Messages
When working under his Mystic Seers moniker, Derek White creates maximalist retro-psych odysseys. He pared things down on May’s Direct Messages, a collection of analog synth instrumentals improvised in a dark room. White described the recording process as a form of meditation, and the album’s pieces, many of which fade in and out in two minutes or less, feel like objects of focus, little blooms of sound that, if allowed, envelop and quiet all other sensations. Each one evokes a particular purity of feeling, be it playful (the toybox keyboard concerto “When You Arrive”), peaceful (the dawnbreak opener “Airplane Mode”), curious (the foraging critter-steps of “Naturebabe”), creepy (the rumbling, panting “Kenzipop”), majestic (the grand baritone notes of “Wizard Flutes”), wistful (the faint, preoperational curl of “Magick Marker”), melancholy (the muted rain-hiss of “Permission to Land”), or mysterious (the dial-up alien muzak of “The Glassport Medium”). Make sure to listen on a good pair of headphones.
If you enjoyed Direct Messages, you might also enjoy: GLO TREE by GLO TREE, Suspension in Time by brednotbred
Merce Lemon – Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild
Merce Lemon has been releasing great music for a while, but she broke out in a big way with September’s Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild (Darling Recordings), a brooding and smoldering and twangy work—recorded in Asheville with producer Alex Farrar—that rippled far beyond the waters of the Allegheny and the Mon. Lemon didn’t exactly leave the bedroom, whose aesthetic characterized previous releases like the warm, dryly whimsical Moonth. It’s more like the bedroom changed its own decor—from nightlights and dragon posters and used sauce packets to spare dark wood and dying house plants—and moved to a different house, somewhere rural, with a yard where wildlife roams among fallen leaves. Backed by arrangements that build from quiet eddies to snarling howls, Lemon sits and looks out the window at her patch of land. She imagines herself “the bird who sings so goddamn loud it wakes you up at dawn” (the buoyant opening waltz “Birdseed”), finds a “Backyard Lover” who curdles eventually to a “fucking liar,” marvels at nature’s poetry (the slow-unfolding “Rain”), allows her un-caressed skin to fall away (the bobbing reverie “Window”), and, finally, on the chill-inducing, album-closing title track, listens to the cymbal-hiss of time’s wind as it rustles the looming trees.
If you enjoyed Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, you might also enjoy: Hiro is Ok by hiroto kei, Finish Your Drinks, The Uber’s Here (no you don’t have time to pee) by My Betsy
Benji. – Love Gun II
Benji., R&B bassist, vocalist, songwriter, and producer extraordinaire, released both the second and third installations of his Love Gun trilogy this year, and they’re both great. The factor that tilts my personal needle toward July’s Love Gun II (SinceThe80s) is the album’s arresting opener, “Howling At The Moon.” The song builds around Benji.’s haunting melodies (“Dancing in the dark / With another glass of wine / Tryna find a way / Back into the light”), which circle restlessly, illuminated by faint electric guitar torchlight, until an urgent cha-cha beat finally drops in. You’re expecting trap rattle—it’s an unexpected choice that works to perfection. “Howling At The Moon”s message of hope (“We all doing life for the first time / Might not get it right on the first try […] Maybe one day you can focus on the joy […] Find your voice in all the noise”) resonates for the rest of the album. Benji. longs breathily for an “I love you” text back on the spritely “Message,” which sounds like a lost Police track, and pulls a Say Anything on the squelchy soul serenade “Radio.” The hope is not passive; there’s accountability here, displayed on the burbling bass workout and vocal tongue-twister “Better” (“There’s only one thing that we already know / We gotta do better”). And the growth never stops, as communal closer “Beautiful Song” makes clear: “We’ll keep making memories to commemorate our souls.”
If you enjoyed Love Gun 2, you might also enjoy: Under Tha Ocean Is Outerspace by Choo Jackson, BEAMS, SCREENS & THE SOUND OF LOVE by Nardo Says & Noa Erni
Gina Gory – Died Laughing
The Government Center—a North Side record store, venue, café, and bar—is one of my favorite places in Pittsburgh. On show nights, you can peruse rows of vinyl, CDs, and cassettes with a wallet-lubricating beer in hand, then stick your head into the next room over for a few hours of music, touring or hometown. As if that wasn’t reason enough to love the Government Center, the space also served as the coagulative force for Gina Gory. The trio—comprising guitarist and store employee Veronika Cloutier, keyboardist and upstairs tenant Dylan Henricksen, and bassist Connaley Martin—cut its teeth playing Government Center shows, and in October released a debut LP, Died Laughing (Michi Tapes), that contained the year’s most haunted-sounding pop music. The songs drag themselves wearily along on the backs of ticking drum machines, plodding bass, grainy synths, and guitars that sound like they’re in the process of being de-strung. The noise nearly buries the bandmates’ eerie, hooky harmonies, but the pure pop elements shine through, sometimes faintly (the warbling, sighing “If This Love Wasn’t True,” the bubbling fish tank racket of closer “Gene’s Last Chance”), often brightly, even playfully (the surfy whir of “Bunny,” the melted ice cream finger wag of “Hart of Gold”). The songs may be ghosts, but they did die laughing, after all.
If you enjoyed Died Laughing, you might also enjoy: spenser ep by James Castle, FADE TO PHARAOH & LONGRANGER by FADE TO PHARAOH & LONGRANGER
XC-17 – EROT
XC-17’s EROT—the year’s headiest dance music release, unleashed onto strobe-lit floors in October—sounds like a series of biomechanical processes occurring under a microscope. The tempos are frenetic, the sonic details granular, the tones tactile, and the rhythms dizzying. The pieces feel like living strands of matter that morph, branch, and interact in real time, controlled by chemical signals generated from some half-organic, half-machine command center. The mutant drum and bass cyclone “RIDRARC” pulses like an overpowered heart, the merciless techno thump “?BLITZ¿” evokes a horde of mercenary white blood cells advancing on a foreign body, closer “AMBIENTPASTA”s throbbing semi-melodies follow the twists of a DNA helix, and “BORA”s glassy whooshes, delicate blips, and guttural gurgles approximate a spirited conversation between different types of proteins. The album is not without a viscerally human element, though; “HIKZ” and “LINA,” both of which feature sweaty, libidinous vocal interjections, sound like they could accompany red-lit sex scenes in a vampire leather movie. When you dance to EROT, try not to trip over your own feet.
If you enjoyed EROT, you might also enjoy: Spectrum of Perception by Oscar Celedon, Self-Defense of 100,000 Thoughts by Ali Berger
Westinghouse Atom Smasher – Pittsburgh, Transylvania
A video accompanies the mournful ballad “Somebody Else’s Country House,” one of the highlights from Westinghouse Atom Smasher’s November release, Pittsburgh, Transylvania. The haunting stop-motion visual, created by Lindsey Shaw, is a stark portrayal of a lonely fabric-hewn figure wasting away in a farmhouse stranded on a space rock. Vast darkness presses in from all sides. The entire album feels like it takes place in this same setting. The yearning that animates country music—the yearning for love, the yearning for boundless freedom—is present, but there are no sheriffs keeping the narrators from their objects of desire, no frontiers left into which they can disappear. These songs yearn for people who are unreachable in a metaphysical sense (the cryptic, candlelit “Green Angel,” the salmon-run piano jaunt “Millvale Apparition”), and recognize that the only possibility of escape lies on the back of a mini motorcycle that belongs to someone else, someone who may never arrive at the door (“Little Honda v0.13”). There may be nowhere left to go. To illustrate, glitchy digital effects encroach at the edges of the rustic arrangements; technology corrodes all that is wild. The prairie rambler’s twang is replaced by vocals that are alternately exhaustion-fried and synth-warped. The best hope lies in the six-minute closer, a graceful piano instrumental called “Escape to the New Black Forest Canary Sanctuary.” The keys’ birdsong gets the final word, with no beeping to be heard.
If you enjoyed Pittsburgh, Transylvania, you might also enjoy: Cowboy 100 by Horace Whisper and the Empty Hand, ADHDTVEP: Attention Deficit Hyperactive Definition Television Extended Play by Beach Boise, ID
The Sewerheads – Despair is a Heaven
Is that a Gothic street parade slouching down a rat-infested midnight alley near you? Nope, it’s The Sewerheads, a supergroup—comprising The Gotobeds’ Eli Kasan on guitar, Empty Beings’ Shani Banerjee on violin, Rave Ami’s Evan Meindl on drums, and Matt Schor on bass—whose debut LP, Despair is a Heaven (Tall Texan), whirled onto the scene in December. The band commits to a darkly theatrical vision, one that melds tattered guitars, keening strings, unorthodox rhythms, and sinister duets, all under the shadowy brim of a black cowboy hat adorned with a blood red rose. It’s outlaw music gone heavy. Kasan and Banerjee share narrative duties with heavy-eyed intonation and quiet intensity, respectively, and Banerjee’s mournful violin and guest Dane Adelman’s emphatic trumpet add the italics and underlines. “Diary of a Priest” struts, confrontational, draped in the frayed vestments of the forsaken, “Your Old Bedroom” crawls and shimmers like an Ennio Morricone antihero theme, the spirited “Memories” follows a lovelorn showbiz trot, and the title track wallows and boogies and gallops like it’s soundtracking the world’s most warped, miserable hoedown. Kasan sums up the ambience on the whirling, bewitched waltz, “Daughter”: “Flies buzzing around my head / In a town that was left for dead.” Rarely does despair have so much flair.
If you enjoyed Despair is a Heaven, you might also enjoy: Come Back, Spider by Pro Video, Still Life by Valleyview
Edhochuli – Higherlander
Hardcore quintet Edhochuli—named after the beloved and similarly brawny NFL referee—emerged from a nine-year sojourn through the craggy between-album wilderness with riffs galore, which they wrangled, dripping sweat and blood, into February’s Higherlander (Zegema Beach/Forcefield/The Ghost is Clear). The band recorded Allman-style this time around, with two drummers, and its members share the Brothers’ knack for showcasing their tight, virtuosic chops via drawn-out epics that feel groovy and loose-limbed as opposed to ponderous or studied; the music also brings to mind early Mastodon in that way, especially swashbuckling opener “Questionably Paleo, Incontrovertibly Neanderthal.” The titles may be goofy, but the songs themselves mean business. “Only Time Will Tell if We Will Stand the Test of Time” pummels with a heavy-swung groove, and then rides a creeping build to an earthquake of a climax. “I Must Build” churns frantically before sweeping through a series of exploratory instrumental passages laden with harmonized guitar leads. To follow the riffs on “I’ll Never Forget Ol’ Whats His Name” is to navigate the minotaur’s labyrinth. Vocalist and bassist Jon Ahn stands astride it all, roaring himself ragged into the void.
If you enjoyed Higherlander, you might also enjoy: Very Little Joy by Mires, All Dogs Go To Heaven by Tough Cuffs
Hardo – Trapnati 3
The artwork that accompanies Trapnati 3 (Trap Illustrated) features the title scrawled in blood; underneath, a cadaverous crow perches atop a human skull. Fitting imagery for an album that surveys its surroundings with the cold eye of the last standing gunfighter. Over the course of sixteen tracks, hip-hop veteran Hardo, along with his impressive roster of guests, stares unflinching into the trenches that molded him. Judging from the bleakness of his recollections, it’s a long way down, and hot at the bottom. Over menacing, minimalist instrumentals—producer Stvii B features heavily—Hardo illustrates the circumstances that landed him in prison (where he “Got the chance to talk to lifers / That made me humble,” from “Real and Humbled”), circumstances that haunt him to this day. From the first line on opener “Counted Me Out” (“Half a million dubs / Feel like I’m lifting a body up”), the stakes are life or death, and even the former is tarnished. On the somber piano drama “Don’t Know How,” Hardo ties his youth (“Mama said please come inside when you hear them gun sounds”) to his present (“How I’m supposed to show what love is / If I ain’t had it once?”) to gut-wrenching effect. He finds hope, though, in small things. On the icy “Never Fallin Off,” he earns enough to buy cable TV for his kids, and on “Don’t Know How,” takes a drink of water, a small oasis in the middle of the desert.
If you enjoyed Trapnati 3, you might also enjoy: Soul Searching by Fedd the God, The Hood Doktor: Tryna Heal The Streets by B Dok
