REVIEW: Dream Wife - Dream Wife

Phillipe Roberts

Cursed with admiration for the well-written hook and burdened by a crippling obsession with separating themselves from the pack (via varying degrees of over-intellectualized "experimentation"), indie rock bands have always found themselves performing a high-wire act. This writer included, the critical establishment often pushes a canon of bands that, to their ears, have managed to strike some idyllic balance between opposing forces, some burying that undeniable knack for pop beneath clouds of noise, and others slicing catchy riffs into irregular time signatures. Ironically, the fear of appearing to seek popularity through instantly recognizable songcraft has squeezed the life out of many a blossoming performer.

But Dream Wife don’t have time for pop pessimism, yours or mine. They’ve been too busy cramming wave after wave of stadium-sized, fist-pumping melodic goodness into every square inch of their long-awaited debut. In a sense, the London-based trio evolved in reverse. Starting as an art school project to create a fake girl band, the three women discovered an unexpected chemistry and ditched highbrow artifice in favor of near-religious dedication to hook-fueled rock and roll. Their first proper LP is 35 minutes of mania, a commanding collection of pop-punk tracks bristling with riotous energy. Dream Wife don’t waste time hiding their melodic gifts, and why should they when the results are so damn fun?

From beginning to end, the band operates within a well-defined universe, rallying around linear, palm-muted riffs, strutting basslines, and yelping choruses determined to pull wallflowers like you onto the dance floor. Dream Wife know their lane and stick to it, but they find enough wiggle room within that paradigm to keep you thoroughly entertained. Opener “Let’s Make Out” leaps right into the fray with rabid abandon—a few reverb-drenched “oohs” and you’re slammed into a throat-shredding chorus, with all credit to vocalist Rakel Mjöll for bringing the bravado in spades. Under her thumb, potential slow-burners like “Love Without Reason” turn into theatrical blowouts that call to mind The Killers at their arena-conquering best, and scuzzy dirtbombs like “Hey Heartbreaker” take on a winking mischief courtesy of her bratty, hiccuping delivery.

The raw power behind Mjöll’s vocals finds a worthy foil in guitarist Alice Go, who howls alongside her partner in crime with a roaring tone that fills in the spaces with a satisfying squeal. Center stage on the album’s best track, “Fire,” is hers entirely. Alternating between seasick bends that ramp up the distortion and metronomic pulsations, the riff explodes off the drums in a flash of garage-rock brilliance.

For every minor moment on the album that seems to skew towards the formulaic (the penultimate track, “Spend the Night,” doesn’t quite break free of its clichés), Dream Wife turn in five massive hooks that muscle their way into the back of your mind with ease. Most of these hew close to the classic rock antics that make up the majority of the record, making final track “F.U.U.” all the more mysterious. A completely blasted, fuzz-fried banger featuring the chant “I’m gonna fuck you up / I’m gonna cut you up / I’m gonna fuck you up,” the track skips along with a hip-hop groove, an update of “Kool Thing” with a modern swing. It’s like nothing else on the record, but there’s a real joy to how Dream Wife turns the tables on you one last time. A sugar-coated fist to the brain, this album hurts too good to ignore.

REVIEW: Turnover - Good Nature

Phillipe Roberts

Between each track on Good Nature, the latest LP from pop-punk trio Turnover, gentle drones overtake their chiming melodies and slide from one song’s key into the next in a cinematic dissolve. It’s a trick they’ve used before, albeit more tentatively, on Peripheral Vision, which found the band rounding out those jagged edges and wading into dreamy, rippling sonics. Now, those details are magnified and expanded; with Alex Getz’s world-weary vocals still far out in front, they serve up slice after slice of deliciously lovelorn, twilight pop. Good Nature finds the band diving even deeper into this newfound affinity for soft crooning and sun-kissed hooks, embracing what could have been a pleasant detour to tug at your heartstrings while their heads swim even further into the clouds.

Far from abandoning pop-punk’s heart-on-sleeve urges, Turnover’s increased focus on atmosphere reinforces them. It’s an approach not dissimilar to kings of soundtrack rock Explosions in the Sky: interlocking guitars shimmer, drums splash and thunder in equal measure. When the band dishes out longer instrumental passages—album closer “Bonnie (Rhythm & Melody)” being the best example—it’s not hard to imagine these searching sounds swirling through Friday Night Lights, and harder still not to wish they’d explore that territory even further. At their best, there’s a sweetly autumnal quality to the music, a sense that something—pride, confusion, or even old musical habits—is drifting away.

But habits die hard, and Alex Getz’s vocals are still firmly rooted in the yearning delivery that characterized their earlier records. And while smoother production succeeds in shifting it towards dreamier pastures, listeners with a knee-jerk aversion to that whining sound might find it hard to ignore.

Thankfully, his lyrical themes have kept pace with the band’s rapid stylistic shifts. Abandoning the scarred, angst-ridden bitterness that occasionally crept into their last album, Getz turns in a more measured, focused set of songs this time around. Peripheral Vision's “I Would Hate You If I Could,” with its tirade against a supposedly “meaningless lover” despite a seething song to the contrary, seems miles away in the rear-view mirror from Good Nature's “All That Ever Was,” with its mantra-like exhortations to “Take what you’ve got / Give it away / It never belonged to you in the first place.”

Indeed, across the album, there’s a sense that Getz is making peace with transience and letting go of a youthfully misguided sense of absolute right and wrong. “What Got In The Way” sees him confronting that directly with an admission that “I don’t know what’s good enough / But I know I need to change my mind,” as a gliding guitar riff pushes him through the current. Considering their harder-edged past, it stands to wonder if the breezier soundscapes are driving this lyrical impulse towards introspection, or vice-versa. But wherever that feedback loop begins, it works beautifully.

“On the last weekend before the fall…” is where we begin Good Nature, and in many ways, that’s where we stay for the entire record. With its crystalline production never showing the slightest cracks—an encore performance for Peripheral Vision producer Will Yip—Turnover preserves those fading summer rays in amber, bundling up in nostalgia while simultaneously leaping forward.

REVIEW: Camp Howard - Juice EP

Laura Kerry

Richmond, Virginia-based Camp Howard take their name from a place that holds special significance for much of the group. Three out of four members of the band—Nic Perea, Wes Parker, and Brian Larson—have known each other since they were 14 (Matt Benson joined the band later), and their music reflects the chemistry that comes from playing and drinking beers by a Virginia river together for a long time.

In their new EP, Juice, released on Egghunt Records, Camp Howard lives up to the summery vibe implied by their name. And anytime the image of beers on a river and a group of college-aged dudes arises, the term “slacker” is sure to follow close behind. With their sometimes-jangly, sometimes-fuzzy guitars leading their indie rock and post-punk sound, Camp Howard does brush up against slackerdom, but their precision and smoothness stop them from going beyond its edges. There's no attempt to disguise the fact that Juice is a thoughtful and polished effort.

One of the most polished elements of the EP is the vocals. Even in the most punk-heavy tracks, like “Fucked Up,” “Country,” and “I Will,” the singer’s voice is smooth and dulcet. Camp Howard has a knack for using harmonies in a number of different contexts to wildly different effects. In “Haircut,” the opener with a jangly guitar and magnetic beat, the sunny harmonies recall The Beach Boys. On “Juice,” a song adapted from an electronic version, the touches of male-female duet sound both sweet and unconventional as they sing, “I will always be yours.” In “Fucked Up,” they add drama to a driving, post-punk chorus, and in on the bridge in “Country,” they lend a pretty respite that resembles Grizzly Bear amid an otherwise intense, fast-paced song.

While the vocals remain consistently pretty and refined, the sounds shift around them. Though they employ the same instruments throughout, the percussion ranges from groovy and sharp in “Haircut” to explosive and propulsive in “Fucked Up”; guitars span from bright and open on “Mismo” to grinding and aggressive on “Country”; and other voices emerge surprisingly—a spacey synth in “Country,” a tambourine on “Juice.” Themes switch from being too drunk to have sex (“Fucked Up”) to political action (“Country”) to wanting someone who has left (“I Will”). Even languages vary, changing from English to Spanish in “Mismo.” Each of these variations resembles a familiar sound—beach-pop, post-punk, pop-punk, to name a few—with a bit of added experimentation. They do each of those styles well, though, making them their own.

In Juice, Camp Howard shows their range as musicians, songwriters, and performers of breezy rock. The only thing left to do is grab a beer, relax, and enjoy the EP.

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: Vundabar - Gawk

Laura Kerry

About a year ago, I saw Vundabar play live by accident. They were opening for Palm and Mothers at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, and I came in halfway through their set while they were in the middle of “Oulala.” The Boston band immediately won me over (I remember remarking to a neighbor in the audience that it was one of the best things I had seen in a while), and I looked them up and listened to their sophomore album from 2015, Gawk, until it naturally fell out of my musical rotation.

With the reissue of Gawk at the beginning of this month comes a reminder of why I was drawn to Vundabar. Much of the energy and precision of their live show comes through on an album that cycles through dense moments of noise and quiet tension. When I saw them, Vundabar fit the bill with Palm and Mothers, the former of whom plays fun and unhinged experimental rock, and the latter who is equal parts angular and aching. The band, though, is as suited to the other bands they’ve opened for, including PWR BOTTOM and Diarrhea Planet, both different shades of noisy and wry. Vundabar can resemble all of those elements and many others—a touch of jangly, a touch of slackerish sludge, a bit of glam—making them sound at once familiar and entirely new.

Underlying all the different sounds in Gawk is a sense of playfulness. Vundabar likes to shift—from quiet guitar to fuzzy and loud; from nonchalant, low vocals to a crisp falsetto; and from weird, off-kilter verses to perfect indie-rock choruses and vice versa. In “Bust,” they jump from a finely tuned, isolated three-part harmony to a swell of distorted noise; in “Allen Blues,” they transform rhythmic, hard-hitting repetitions of “na” (think Weezer) into a quiet, fluid version of the same; and in “Desert Diddy,” a subdued first part of the chorus gives way to an explosive second half. Vundabar switches tones throughout the album, manipulating moments of suspense and release that is completely gripping.

Similar shifts happen in the lyrics, primarily along an axis ranging from don’t-give-a-fuck nonsense to earnest and confessional. “The sun is fun / The land is dandy / I only talk to dogs because they don't understand me,” they sing in “Allen Blues,” creating a kind of pop-punk nursery rhyme. The end of the verse takes a turn towards the direct, though, with, “I need to purge my urges, shameshameshame / I need an alibi to justify and somebody to blame.” In “Bust,” they turn philosophical: “I know enough to know I don't know anything.”

There’s charmingly comic swagger, too, particularly in the final song, “Shuffle,” a fuzzy bonus track added for the reissue, which includes the refrain, “I just want to hear my own voice” (sung with effects that render the singer’s voice the least clear of any vocals on the album). It’s impossible to predict where Vundabar will take the listener next in Gawk, but it’s a pleasure to have a second chance to try to find out.