Better Late Than Never Department
I regret to inform you that I slept on Beautifully Doomed. Released back in July, the new album by Fort Worth indie rockers LAZER BLAZER further crystalizes — especially on a song called “crystaleyesed” — the band’s take on shoegaze-y, pop-inflected guitar rock. LAZER BLAZER’s sound is waves of reverb-washed chords breaking up over a reef of Jason Lytle-like keyboard bleeps and dreamy synth pads, as gloomy, grungy riffs dart in and out like rockfish. If you’ve ever had a CD wallet full of Jesus and Mary Chain, Modest Mouse, My Bloody Valentine, and Pavement, you’re probably fated to enjoy Beautifully Doomed.
Also slept on: “Ornette,” the latest single by improvisational dub-inspired jam project Stem Afternoon. Recorded by multi-instrumentalist Clint Niosi at his Orange Otter Audio and released in September, the track pays homage to Fort Worth’s best-known experimental jazz musician, Ornette Coleman. Stem Afternoon specializes in moody, cinematic, instrumental passages, and their new single digs hard into an atmosphere of tense, spaced-out noir. Drummer Mykl Garcia and bassist Cyrus Haskell drop into a menacing groove colored by splashy cymbals and bendy, low-end growl, creating a propulsive plot for Niosi’s guitar and Garcia’s overdubbed trumpet to weave through like a pair of homicide detectives following the clues left in FT Dub’s scratches and samples.
Since we’re on the subject of Clint Niosi, he released a new single last week. “Destroyer of Worlds” is a haunting, smoldering rumination on humanity’s gravitation toward self-destruction, viewed through the lens of nuclear proliferation. Singing “I am become death, destroyer of worlds” in the choruses, Niosi’s baritone balances a tone between cynicism and bemusement, like if “Cat People”-era David Bowie were somehow able to read the headlines of the 2020s. Backed by Haskell, plust multi-instrumentalist Claire Hecko on viola, violinist Tamara Cauble Brown, drummer Eddie Dunlap, and saxophonist David Williams, Niosi conjures a spacious, last-night-on-earth ambience for what I’d call “dread-signation,” a sort of doleful acceptance of a truly baffling scenario — that humans will always fight fire with fire until nothing but ashes and dust remain.
And speaking of dust, while listening to the new self-titled album by long-running metal band Caddis, I learned that its lead-off track, “Apep Coil,” is the name of the “serpentine dust clouds surrounding a massive binary star system named Apep,” which themselves are named for an Egyptian snake god who wrapped himself around Ra’s boat. Released in August, Caddis is the area metal band’s first album in seven years — why its gestation took this long is unknown to me, but I’d guess that a lot of it had to do with composition, because it’s as brainy as it is heavy. Guitarists Nathan Morris and Ben Schultze weave contemplative, Mastodon-ic phrases that arpeggiate into the Great Beyond, almost floating into the cosmos before yawing into pummeling thrash runs and complex, oddly timed breakdowns powered by the nuclear engine of drummer Andrew Trips and bassist Bob Nash. Sean Vargas’ furious bellow lurches over it all like an eldritch yeti, and the whole record sounds like the soundtrack to a harrowing journey between Apep Coil’s stars on the Sun God’s serpent-constricted watercraft — sort of like the Kessel Run of Star Wars legend, if the Millennium Falcon looked like a Dodge van and Han Solo’s vest was made of denim. Penultimate track “Demon Mirror” is probably my favorite (as the combo of solo’d fuzz bass and pinch-harmonic squealies is pretty much a tractor beam on my brain), but the whole thing rips from start to finish, packing a ton of satisfying aural punishment and proggy pyrotechnics into half an hour. Crank this the next time you have to drive to Dallas or take an interstellar trip imperiled with cosmic debris!
Finally, the last new record I finally got around to absorbing is Stone Machine Electric’s Faces, which the Hurst-based “doom jazz” trio dropped onto Bandcamp a month ago. Opening with the ominous, Phrygian keyboard figure of “Just Another Wizard,” the band settles into a six-song showcase of their signature, exploratory grooves and high-gain, Sleep-worshipping, shredding. Singer-guitarist Dub Irvin’s baritone growl stalks across a hazy wasteland irradiated by his heavy guitar distortion and the hypnotic pocket of drummer Mark Kitchens and bassist Erick Pacheco. Over their 15-plus years of churning out turgid, brain-frying stoner-rock jams, Faces sees Stone Machine Electric honing their prodigious improvisational chops into legit songcraft, something that dawned on me near the end of the album mid-point, “Chroma,” and two songs later, on “Price of It All,” in which the band, perhaps challenging themselves to write something radio-friendly, banged out some genuinely fun, fist-pumping hooks. But even with more focused songwriting, SME can still ride a riff to the edge of a black hole. On “Manic,” Irvin’s soloing sounds like he’s inscribing eons of lore into the side of an obelisk stretching to the moon, but the song’s martial shuffle and Kitchens’ clean, almost regal vocals provide bookends for the six-string sagas.
Before I Forget Department
A mere four months after they dropped their excellent, blistering album White Hot, Mid-Cities psyche-punk Labels have a new single out on Nov. 1. “Traitors,” co-written by drummer Taylor Burgan and singer Tyler Waller and produced by guitarist Braden Burgan at the band’s home studio, is a furious refutation of America’s slide into fascism, in which the Burgan brothers’ angsty, anxious beats and distorted blasts carry Waller’s wide-eyed rage like a crowd carrying an upside-down flag set on fire. Frankly, this is the kind of song more bands ought to be writing, though good luck sounding this pissed.
