REVIEW: .michael. - Blustery Dreams Of Me Rendered Smiley Seeing You, Always

Laura Kerry

Our minds are good at filling in and creating meaning from what’s around us. Animation, for example, uses distinct frames with changing images that form fluid movements when we view them fast enough. Similarly, humans see animals in clouds and faces in food. Given the right stimuli, we make complete, vibrant pictures and stories.

In Blustery Dreams Of Me Rendered Smiley Seeing You, Always, .michael. makes a whole world from a clarinet and a guitar. A collaboration of Brooklyn musicians Winter Sorbeck and Michael Sachs—who on their Bandcamp page refer to themselves cryptically as Michael and Michael—the duo expands themes that they introduced in their 2015 debut, Home Is Where You Hang Your Heart Is. Perhaps it’s these kinds of evocative titles, or the handmade puppets on the cover of the new LP that recall Where the Wild Things Are, but .michael. begins to establish the dreamy, childlike magic of their music before the first notes play.

When they do play, those notes don’t disappoint. Blustery Dreams opens on “Never Come Back,” one of about half the songs on the album that include singing. In it, the vocals are delicate and unaffected, resembling the tender innocence of Sufjan Stevens as acoustic guitar and clarinet trade between melody and rhythm behind them. “I want to have a breezy outlook, drink lemonade / Climb that foggy mountain, plow right through those branches / Hold your hand,” they sing, ending the song on a sweet note after introducing an earlier lost love.

When .michael. includes vocals, the lyrics are often heavier than their sound suggests. “I’m really sorry that I made you fearful to the point of almost ruining my life,” they sing on “Tall in a Straight Line,” and “I’ve had a heartbreak for a while and I won’t be coming back for a while to this town,” in “Heartbreak.” From quiet combinations of voice and two instruments, .michael. weaves intricate folk and baroque-infused tales of sadness and glimmers of hope.

Even when they have no voices to carry the stories, .michael. paints vivid pictures. In songs such as “Tumbleweed of the Soul” and “Put Put,” the guitar and clarinet replace vocals, flitting around conversationally. With only two tools at their disposal, Sacks and Sorbeck cover a large swath of dynamic territory, sometimes squawking in anguish, flitting around nervously, or flowing romantically. In these moments, the listener hears an entire classical symphony in the spaces between the two instruments. The artists emphasize that leap with the only cover on the album, “One of Five,” which reimagines the first of Stravinsky’s series of piano duets, “Five Easy Pieces.”

Between folk songs and neoclassic covers, .michael. creates something that’s entirely their own. And throughout Blustery Dreams, they remind us of that with songs that are addressed to themselves—“Sorry Michael,” “Michael Doesn’t Remember,” and “Namaste, Mike.” Sometimes, the album feels like stepping into someone else’s dream, an intimate and disorienting exercise that leaves us with only hints and fragments of the whole. As is the natural progression of disparate parts, though, the dream eventually takes beautiful and cohesive shape.

PREMIERE: Berdmajik - Scattered Ashes

"Scattered Ashes," the latest single from Berdmajik's upcoming debut, Spells, certainly feels as mystical as its name would imply. Awash in shimmering synths, hazy guitars, and otherworldly vocals, it's an irresistible psychedelic dreamscape.

The solo project of Donnie Felton, best known as one half of Grubby Little Hands, Berdmajik is a much more explicitly electronic outfit than his previous work. "Scattered Ashes" will be recognizable to fans of his other recordings, though, with its sunny melody and melancholy undertones, making it feel like a natural evolution of his songwriting style. And after two excellent tracks so far, we can't wait to hear how the rest of it comes together.

Spells is out May 19 on Golden Brown, and you can pre-order it here.

REVIEW: the spirit of the beehive - pleasure suck

Laura Kerry

The much-anticipated second full-length of indie rockers The Spirit of the Beehive begins with a cinematic flurry of violin notes. Then “Pleasure Suck I” launches into a dense and catchy garage-rock part with bells to give it a pop brightness. Then, after moments of dissonance and fuzz, it lets loose a slow, echoing refrain, “Pleasure sucks the life out of everyone,” before dissolving into a muffled, shuffling sound effect. This is the disorienting manner in which all of Pleasure Suck progresses, with pop following alternative following abstracted, indecipherable space noise. At one point in listening to the album, a transition hit so abruptly that it caused me to jump. (Spoiler: Beware of “Twenty First Road Trip.”)

The Philadelphia-based band creates perplexing and surprising music, but the most interesting surprise is the way that that music manages to hang together so coherently. Pleasure Suck is a patchwork of different textures, styles, and sounds, but the gestalt is—to (perhaps unwisely) continue with the metaphor—a quilt of sometimes-warm, sometimes-jagged psych-rock that jangles as much as it jolts.

In “Ricky (Caught Me Tryin’),” for example, a succession of dissonant intervals in the voice and distorted guitar give way to a catchy chorus: “You don’t need an education ... It’s only in your mind.” The Spirit of the Beehive picks up this slacker strain again throughout the album, including in “Cops Come Looking,” in which they sing, “I’m stoned again / I don’t know you / Think I’m searching,” in a clean but hazy style that sounds like Real Estate after smoking all day on a worn-down porch. “Mono Light Crash,” a spoken story about a Texan arriving at Logan Airport in Boston without his luggage, gels into a rhythmic, guitar-driven pop song accented by disembodied, sampled voices. In “Becomes the Truth,” concentrated noise punctuated by screechy feedback follows a suspenseful drone into a spacious pop track that declares, nonchalantly but convincingly, “No one tell me what to do.”

That relaxed defiance carries through much of Pleasure Suck, but at its core, the album is anything but relaxed. As they reveal in each shift, build, and explosion, The Spirit of the Beehive make meticulous music. Their fuzz isn’t just an effect, but a layered substance comprised of multiple guitars, synths, and voices in just the right mixture; their tone isn’t just nervousness, but a tension created between dissonance and breezy pop; and their abrupt changes aren’t just tricks, but calculated movements designed to tug us in deliberate directions. Or maybe not. Maybe The Spirit of the Beehive is just fucking with us after all. Whatever their angle, though, it’s working.

REVIEW: Decibelles - Tight

Laura Kerry

By some accounts, the Lyon, France-based band Decibelles met in 2014. By others, it was 2015 or 2016, but in any case, the group began a handful of years ago, when its founding members were teenagers. Now in their mid-to-late twenties and several albums into making music together, the experience is evident. In their new album, Tight, the trio—now comprised of Sabrina Duval, Fanny Bouland, and newest member Lamson Nguyen—Decibelles shows off their style of pop and punk with a dynamism and bravado that speaks to a sense of ease.

From the first feedback-heavy notes on the LP, Decibelles make their presence known. The opener, “Mess,” is aptly named; it floods the ears with fuzzed-out and screeching guitars, crashing drums, and screaming vocals reminiscent of the bite of Bikini Kill Kathleen Hanna and the yelp of Le Tigre Kathleen Hanna. Throughout the album, the trio uses their guitars as expressively as they use their voices. Guitars shriek, hang in suspense, and drive aggressively. In “Pas Les Humains,” an interlude of sorts, people fade into the distance as glitchy, indecipherable speech, leaving layers of instruments to forcefully propel the listener into the second half of the album.

Beside the assertive guitars and dynamic yelling exists a lighter, poppier strain that runs through Tight. Counter to the opening song’s title, the album’s name also represents it well. Decibelles makes tight, well-crafted music that takes care with its melodies and their underlying compositions. After “Mess” comes “Super Fish,” comprised of a brighter, more rigidly-structured sound. Reaching Strokes-level fuzz, the guitars set the tone for a clearer, airier track. “Sausage Day,” “Le Seum,” and “Witchy Babes” also favor a sparser, plainer tone with more more pop sentiments. Though production sometimes feels thin on these quieter tracks, they allow Decibelles to achieve an overall balance on the album, alternating between total submersion in noise and breaths of fresh air.

While they mix in brighter, gentler sounds amid the aggression, Decibelles is anything but soft in their sentiments. At the center of Tight are proclamations of independence, empowerment, and general feminist badassery. In “Sausage Day,” they dismiss the complaints lodged against women’s appearances, singing, “Your skirt is too tight / Your clothes don't fit you right / They say they are looking for romance... / I just want to dance.” In “Hu! Hu!,” a propulsive song structured around repeated yelps, the singer repeats, “Are you kidding me?” Later, she challenges, “Do you think I’m your damn secretary / Do you expect me to make your coffee / You’re not my daddy.” Like riot grrrls who came before them, Decibelles use a punk platform to tackle what’s on their minds, not only singing about their boldness, but also enacting it with their sound. “Should I be scared of the night?” Decibelles repeat in “Hu! Hu!,” but after a listening to their easy, fun, and striking new album, it’s hard to imagine that they fear anything.

REVIEW: Karaocake - Here and Now

Kelly Kirwan

“I let my youth slip / I let my youth go / Can we go back in time / When we took things slow?”

A deep unfolding synth surrounds the lyrics, a crinkling wave that washes across Karaocake’s opening track on their latest album, Here and Now. Camille Chambon’s voice cuts through the melody—with all its blips of futuristic synth and the digitized likeness of an organ—in a nonchalant, monotone pitch. "Youth Slip" is a backwards glance that teeters between nostalgia and an apathetic understanding of how the past is written in stone. It plays on an old adage, that youth is wasted on the young, with somber, chamber-pop flourishes and some avant-garde garnishes.

It’s no wonder that this is our first taste of the duo’s new work (with Stéphane Laporte as Karaocake’s other half), which explores our relationship to time—it’s constraints, and how it bends with our perception. "Youth Slip" is a song that longs for what was, and it’s no surprise that its accompanying video is cobbled together from long-held VHS footage, panning between a group of boys jamming together with a silly demeanor.

"Mother of it all" opens with a stream of static, drawn with misty, '80s-influenced synths and a quick-footed beat. Chambon’s voice is softer than it was in "Youth Slip," fleshed out with a bit more intonation as the beat chugs along, arcade-inspired beeps skittering (subtly) in the background. “Nothing could be said or could be done / Now I know you’re gone / You, the mother of it all,” we hear as the melody builds, and there’s a distinct feeling of forward motion.

"Mothers & Fathers" serves as an ode to (yes, you guessed it) our parents. It’s a slower, softer song, with light, swerving synths and still more space-age, computerized bleeps dotting the melody. "Sometimes they fail / To be what is expected of them / Don’t regret the things you’ve done … There’ll be time for us to heal, I’m sure.” It’s a heartfelt letter from child to parent, and the lyrics have a bit of an edge while still being softened with forgiveness.

Here and Now is a tightly-crafted album. The music matches the geometry of the album art, comprised of neat intersections that feel like an interdimensional maze. I recommend you explore it.