Down The Wire: Iceage, Squid, Doss, FACS, and Daniel Bachman
by Howard, Henry, Donald, Dave, and Minimal
Iceage: Seek Shelter
by Howard Cresi-Stallworth and Henry T. Rodgers
There are artists who are chameleonic, dynamic—those capable of constant reinvention—and there are those who try on many pairs of pants. The last two decades have had a slew of bands distinctly the latter, with groups like Arcade Fire, late period Wilco, King Gizz, and Parquet Courts (to name a few) switching styles as though they were fashion trends. Iceage is, perhaps, the band with the most pants in their closet as of late. Since their first album they have managed to psy-op critics into thinking that attempts at Christian Death, The Mekons, and the milieu of leather jacket rock have all been groundbreaking efforts.
It’s a trend, a ghost from the past we can’t exorcise. The first list of groups were raised up by younger critics from the underground, critics who found themselves as a voice for those coming out of the nascent Web 2.0 world, where young, precocious music fans were ready to accept these bands into a timeline of pop progression set by Rolling Stone and Billboard before them. These were far from linear scenes evolving from genres in the past. No, they were often bands picked from critics friends, or lobbied in from a loud prideful critic who lucked out in getting their favorite group noticed. Once they were in, they existed in the nebulous zone of “importance” or “being noticed,” young kids were taking them seriously, and after they weren’t they wouldn’t leave.
When the ‘00s hit, many of these young kids were curious as to where rock, pop, and hip hop would go next, where would it come from? Well the internet of course. When kids found these critics and these bands it made perfect sense to think of them as fitting into the timeline and evolution set by the baby boomer groups before them. Except that these groups were never set on evolving like that or even growing. This is where these groups, the critics, and the fans fell. They trusted that these bands would pull themselves up and out, instead these groups coming from an ego bolstered by incestuous praise didn’t take risks. They wanted to play dress up and record collector rock, fittingly appealing to the dregs of a generation of criticism.
And so the dregs scrape the bottom of the barrel and serve up Seek Shelter. Here the motley crew of Danish models struts the runway in a pair they wore on Beyondless, courtesy of Mick Jagger and Primal Scream. The two questions for bands like this should always be what are they bringing to this sound and do they execute it effectively. For Seek Shelter? Nothing and no. Despite chasing after whatever clout Peter Kember might have, making the guitar pedal auteur the album's producer results in dreck. This ‘90s scuzz rock aesthetic they are trying to draw from—this lineage that goes back to the Stones, to Scream, and Spacemen 3—is lost in an awful mix that renders all but Elias’s strained bellowish attempt at Jagger quiet. There’s barely a high end to speak of, On “Shelter Song” the choir mixes in and is drowned out by the guitars when it is clearly meant to bolster and support Elias’s voice. I’m left mystified as to why this mix is so bad. Is it incompetence or a hamfisted attempt to achieve the sound of the aforementioned bands through digital means alone? This mix is so compromised you’d think it was made to drool out a bluetooth speaker, drool with all the sad inert energy of rocking by yourself with a bottle of Barefoot on a Saturday night. And for an artist that proclaims a latent desire to write pure pop hits, he seems to have no sense for the brevity that requires. One of the only viable hits “Vendetta” quickly grows tired after it rounds its 3 minute mark, forcing the listener to endure the most plodding and obvious Stone tribute, awash in Elias’s preening, biblical pseudo-erudition. This last bit is a trend in guitar bands that I’m at the end of my rope with. They have forgotten what a pop song actually is, and yet vanguard critics keep hoisting it at us, this overwrought yet under thought noodling with an effects pedal, a quarter of a song that extends out into an six minute track.
Iceage’s progression is not suprising. The modern progression for rock groups post 2000 is to follow the weird, dour dark rock of Nick Cave and The Rolling Stone’s swaggering bad boy attitude. Except now in the land of dress up, it’s all show and no dour, no swagger, and almost no rock. Seek Shelter, in a nutshell, is the most dry and compressed supro amp garage rock this side of an Athens, Georgia show at the 40 Watt.
FACS: Present Tense
by Minimal
Beware: the time of Covid retrospectives are upon us. It's only alluded to directly in one song, but reflections on the 2020 experience are all over FACS’ fourth album, Present Tense—and why not? The Chicago group has spent four years playing with sonic dimensions and creating shimmery, cavernous, nervy post-punk. Last spring's empty, haunted cities were the perfect backdrop to their brand of music and provide a much needed thematic base, with references to ghosts, isolation, regret, and abstracted memories. Sadly, FACS yet again drowns in their "modern art rock" pretensions with a record equal parts fascinating and frustrating.
The best virtues of Present Tense lie in FACS’ instrumentation. Make no mistake, it's consciously confrontational, tense music. Brian Case's guitarwork sounds like it's slanted at twenty degrees, while Alianna Kalaba's brain-dead simple bass buzzes with a sludgy edge. Menacing in the background are Noah Ledger's drums, punchy and perfectly mixed. The only real update of their sound is the addition of whirling, glitchy keyboards to build up the feeling of seasickness. All the trappings of post-punk are here, but where the last twenty years of genre worship only played with angularity and general obtuseness, the band brings the oft missing element of dub to at least create interesting musical worship (think Wire’s 154 but more intentionally alienating).
The album’s highlights come from moments of straightforward punk/pop sensibilities not seen on their previous releases. Opener "XOUT" oozes paranoia as the music shutters from jagged stabs to sonic bludgeoning as Case howls about interpersonal "waaaAAARRR", while "How To See In The Dark" satisfies with the band playing a determined, skeletal rhythm to Case now giving advice for seeing through the dark (times). Both are simple, effective, and finish their job in under three minutes. "Strawberry Cough" is the band's first honest instance of verse-chorus, and it works wonders as a standout narrative about the pandemic's early months. Glitched sounds spring up with dizzying tremolo, combining with a looped icy guitar to create an uneasy sense of suspended animation. The title itself is a vivid bit of poetic allusion to the virus, both disarming and horrifying as Case moans "You do it until you cannot". Its chorus is all the more unsettling as the double-tracked vocals slightly warp over a guitar and keyboard that bloom from a thick bed of bass, giving a notion of something taking root and growing.
Even with these welcome developments, FACS still struggle with the same issues that plagued their previous releases. “Alone Without”, like their other lengthy and ambitious songs, completely blows it. Slowly building as an ominous cloud of noisy anxiety, so much excitement is generated just by wondering how and when the ruckus will explode. The song then turns utterly flaccid two and half minutes in and never develops into anything that justifies nine whole minutes of your life. Elsewhere, the band remains inconsistent with writing compelling endings. While they no longer default to letting their songs build to clipped, overwrought crescendos—“Mirrored” is good until its second climax, totally unnecessary even as the album’s closer—the momentum can simply peter out rather than meaningfully resolve. Then there’s the lyrics. Pieced together from random phrases strewn across a page à la dada, they stink of unmerited pretension more often than not. Combined with Case’s vocals, which have the tendency to sound like if Marilyn Manson went to art school, you’ve got a recipe for some truly spotty performances. “General Public” and “Present Tense” come across as dull free verse poetry exercises in the form of “[SONG TITLE]/…”, and “How To See In The Dark” is borderline Rupi Kaur with its bromides. Most egregious of the bunch is the title track, a car crash of eye-rolling lines and a truly obnoxious musical switch-up that happens a third of the way through.
It’s a shame that the trio is still preoccupied with coming across as “difficult” or “arty”, as they truly have the talent to build unique soundscapes and powerful rhythms. Take “Strawberry Cough”—even though they take a more typical pop format and dress it up with fascinating sonics, FACS manages to make it feel like a mere concession. They can’t help but attempt to make it more “intellectual” by name checking the critical concept of hauntology in the chorus. How clunky can you be? Hopefully in the future the band continues to hone their musical dynamism and drop their artifice along the way.
SQUID: Bright Green Field
By Donald Gorinchem
Squid are the third band from the Speedy Wunderground label and the Brixton Windmill scene to sign to a larger label (Warp in Squid’s case) and deliver a debut album. The label and club have recently become a hotbed for new, exciting British guitar music that has a foot in the past, but looks boldly to the future. Squid and their scene-mates black midi and Black Country, New Road get lumped together due to these label and scene connections, along with some similar sonic reference points. Much has been made of the influence of UK art punk acts of the late 70s and early 80s, along with other angular, noisy rock bands from the past. At the same time, each transcends their influences in unique ways.
Squid is the least obtuse, most rhythmic and more straightforwardly catchy band of the three. A song like “The Cleaner” from their Speedy Wunderground EP, 2019's "Town Centre," my initial exposure to the band, is indicative of this. The Cleaner is a song indebted to 2000's dance punk, via it's disco-inspired beat, and the vocals, which sound almost James Murphy-esque in their quirky cadence. The band mines this further on "Bright Green Field," many songs featuring strong grooves, whether that be from dance music or krautrock, and the idiosyncratic vocals of drummer Ollie Judge. In “Bright Green Field,” the band have produced a flawed, but still very enjoyable full length.
The main issue with the album is that some of the longer songs outstay their welcome, as does the album as a whole at 54 minutes. For example, lead single "Narrator" sets up a nice groove for the first few minutes, and builds up to an exciting climax in it's back half, but overall it doesn't fully justify it's 8-and-a-half-minute running time. While it still adds up to a good song, the overly repetitive "I play my..." section could have built itself up a little quicker, tightening the song overall. Elsewhere "Boy Racers" starts as a standard groovy post-punk cut, but surprisingly breaks down into a meditative ambient section halfway through. While this is an interesting turn, it stretches the song to seven and a half minutes which don’t feel entirely earned. Even "Paddling," one of the strongest cuts on the album, takes a few minutes to get to its tasty angular krautrock groove, minutes that are not entirely needed. The "dig holes like a mole" lyric is also fairly inane and takes me out of the song. But these are minor nitpicks in what is still a great song. The only one of the longer songs that fully justifies its length all the way through is the closer, the excellent “Pamphlets.” Throughout its 8 minutes, it maintains interest and a sense of drama, exploding in its last few minutes and bringing the album to an exciting conclusion. Consequently, it’s perhaps the strongest song on the album, and proves the band is plenty capable of producing a longer form song.
Despite these rather minor criticisms, the album overall is far from a failure. Rather, the album's strength comes from some of the shorter songs. “G.S.K." opens the album nicely, drawing you into its dystopian world with a strong mid tempo krautrock groove. “Peel St.” is equal parts danceable and angular, with angry shouted vocals. “Global Groove” is laid back, with a mournful horn line. All three songs together cover a fair amount of sonic ground, but individually don’t overstay their welcome. Overall, “Bright Green Field” shows the band starting to live up to their potential despite some minor setbacks. Another fine notch in the belt of the Speedy Wunderground alumni.
Daniel Bachman: Axacan
by Dave Johnson
Daniel Bachman's record “Axacan”, released on May 7th, is not necessarily a quiet, ambient solo guitar record. The plainly gorgeous, purple-bordered photo of the Blue Ridge mountains on the cover might lead you to believe so — it made me think of the minimal art of albums released on the long-defunct new age label Windham Hill Records; art which often evoked a sanitary, yet meditative approach to acoustic music. Having not heard Daniel Bachman's work prior to this release, I was surprised to find in “Axacan” nothing as intentionally blissful or reflective as my initial expectations suggested: rather, “Axacan” explores a full range of tones. Bachman uses noise not as ornamentation but as precise interruptions of silence: seat-belt alarms beep erratically, waves crash, and radio transmissions jaggedly hiss — and yes, sometimes they are augmented by the plaintive strum of a full-bodied acoustic guitar.
The music on “Axacan” often feels dark and mournful. The title of the record is, according to Bachman himself, derived from the first Spanish settlement in what is now known as Virginia — and the recordings were all made within the boundaries of the 16th century encampment. The aforementioned darkness doesn't arise from Bachman's psyche or some sort of self-reflective morosity: rather, one feels that it is channeled through the recordings through the entanglement of history and place. The artistic space that Bachman carves out for himself isn't the dirt-drunk, esoteric troubadour of John Fahey (an all-too common comparison for anyone who decides to play solo guitar music) or the meditative transcendence of Robbie Basho — rather, Bachman is an analytic sage; using sound to investigate a space and coax out the histories within.
This is an exciting time for solo guitar — Yasmin Williams (who released a great record earlier this year), Jakub Simansky, and Bill Orcutt are among Bachman's contemporaries. “Axacan” is a rewarding, unique piece of music, a welcome entry into the milieu. Put it on, and you might find yourself lost in the nooks and crannies of Daniel Bachman's exploratory sounds — or perhaps you're losing yourself in the meshing of music, place, and history: washing away in the waves of the Chesapeake, or journeying in the uncertain forests of the Blue Ridge.
Doss: 4 New Hit Songs
by Howard Cressi-Stallworth
Genre hopping artist house and pop influenced Doss has returned after a hiatus with a slow trickle of singles over the past few months. “Strawberry”, “Puppy”, “Look” and most recently “On Your Mind” have been satiating the hunger of the fans of yore who had been following Doss since the early 2010s, that by-gone era of internet based artists such as CFCF, Elite Gymnastics and SALEM. Cheekily entitled “4 New Hit Songs” has just gotten a full release after each song got a proper video release over the last few months.
Doss returns without the need to feel attached to that previous era or any era for that matter. That time period and all its various incarnations, press discussions or online communities are long gone but the music keeps on. While some songs might stray too far to the pop end of Doss’s music for some, they still transcend their initial influences for something better. Starting with “Puppy” a familiar mix of pre-prepared beats, bass rumblings, house piano notes and pitched vocals are all couched within synth washes and effect treatments. Coupling that with Doss’s now familiar late 90s early 00s cartoonish imagery presented online identity, Doss delivers upon that bygone promise of a proper delivery of an artist minded of the past descending upon the present.
Just as soon as “Puppy” exits, “Look” enters with a 180 turn. Tweaked stark beats enter with a pitched vocal line and various ephemera around the twisting of the line “on my own” as Doss’s vocals sit clear and upfront in the mix as the song contorts around it. “Strawberry” follows and is one of the strongest tunes out of the bunch. Featuring a slow shifting haze that eventually builds into an early 90s slowed down breakbeat across some same era distorted guitars. “Strawberry” is proof that Doss can play dress-up in “out of the box” samples in a Y2K world but just as well go to the cooler side of the fence and hang with the rock crew.
Final track “On Your Mind” exits with a bubbling and dance infused track keeping things on an up note. If any track has the strongest production it’s this one. The second half features some textbook classic bass production. If there is any criticism of Doss’s music is that it does appear to be one note and pulling from a playbook of “take one vocal line and chop it up and then repeat it in full in the chorus and then have a synth breakdown here”. However, considering the playbook that Doss is not only pulling from but reworking, it works now and works well, ultimately one hopes that Doss further transcends it. Doss’s version of shapeshifting new millennium house and pop is welcome just as long as they follow what they did with “Strawberry” and follow a path that sees new music come in sooner rather than later.