PREMIERE: MANKIND - Art P

Will Shenton

The opening notes of MANKIND's latest single, "Art Prostitute," set a tone that's at once apprehensive and nonchalant. The vocals kick in shortly, awash in exasperated bluntness, and we're treated to a narrative of white wigs, blue makeup, and what seems to be the masquerade of a tragically hip New Year's Eve party—all wrapped in some supremely punchy garage rock.

The latter track on the Swedish four-piece's new release is a fairly expansive cover of the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting For The Man." In addition to being nearly six minutes longer than the original, it embraces more of a deconstructive, psychedelic vibe, perhaps in a nod to the band's ridiculously long noise-jams when they played it live. It ends with an entropic, almost Wilco-esque fadeout, which works well to put a new twist on such a classic song.

Out January 1st on Lazy Octopus Records, Art P seems a fitting send-off to 2016. Both tracks convey a deep, cynical impatience, a desire to abandon all pretense and simply get the hell on with things. It's a sentiment echoed by many of us, and while I can't say this single has alleviated my fears about the immediate future, at least MANKIND has given us a hell of a soundtrack for the dawn of the new year.

REVIEW: MIYNT - Ep. no 1

Kelly Kirwan

MIYNT's croon is hushed, lingering over each and every word of her lyrics, her consonants burning lethargically together to comprise one elongated pronunciation. It's a slow-slinking, almost feline deliberateness which swarms our latest Stockholm import, who's absorbed the influences of her father's old '80s records (of the Swedish punk persuasion), and added a lackadaisical disco garnish. Her melodies shimmer in grey shades, as if we were watching a grainy black-and-white movie, whose reel was filled with rolling shots of urban landscapes, and slow-motion harmless acts of rebellion. It's a genre of music that simmers, garnering comparisons to a grittier Lana Del Ray.

Behind the musical moniker is Fredrika Ribbing, who first started to turn heads with her sultry, acoustically-strummed cover of Britney Spears’ "...Baby One More Time" in 2015. With her soft melancholy, rough edges, and slow-wave style, Ribbing sidestepped lingering fears that she started too late in the game (where pop stars are often groomed beginning in their single digits) and went on to release her latest, Ep. no 1, with B3SCI Records.

MIYNT’s six-track debut had the helping hand of producer Daniel Nigro, whose ear for soundscapes has previously worked with artists like Carly Rae Jepsen, JR JR, and Sky Ferreira. With MIYNT’s vision and Nigro’s guidance, the two have created a pleasingly moody palette, painted with rich and hazy instrumentation and highlighted by sighing vocals.

Take the gently unfolding “Bird,” which opens with MIYNT's signature murmuring lisp of a croon: “Say do you really want to know / Patiently I let them go / Through my window / You light a cigarette and look at me / Like I was some kind of threat / Someday I’ll confess.” Her voice is a haunting rumination laid over muted swells of reverb, later joined by an intimate guitar and cymbal-esque percussion. It’s a featherweight sort of sadness, which adds to the trance-like, floating quality of her work, rather than pulling us into a dark spell.

Then there’s "The Deer or the Hunter," which opens on a pulsating, high-pitched synth and sharp percussion. MIYNT’s voice melts, having the seductive quality of a heat mirage, warping her surrounding scenery. The song switches between stripped-down, quiet moments with a bare instrumentation and a lush, densely undulating backdrop. “Here I lost my cards / Here my lost notion / I swim with the sharks back to the ocean,” MIYNT sings lazily, the song pivoting on the question of predator or prey, and in all honesty, we've probably slipped into the latter role. Despite the slightly ominous vibes she emits, we still walk forward, pupils dilated with fascination. MIYNT has a sedated hook, and it sinks into us quick.

While MIYNT may be a Swedish native, she has the easy swagger of a Los Angeles transplant that’s touched down in Echo Park. With a grungy tint and electronic flourishes, she makes music that’s magnetic—piquing our curiosity for the hopefully inevitable Ep. no 2.

PREMIERE: Growth - Ice Age

Laura Kerry

When you think of Swedish musical exports, odds are that one of its pop icons—ABBA, Ace of Base, or Robyn, to name a few—comes to mind. The band, Growth, is Swedish, but it certainly does not fit that mold. An all-female trio, they have earned a small but dedicated following with their sparse but punchy garage rock with a dose of punk. 

In their new single, “Ice Age,” Growth continues to defy their country’s reputation in a five-minute song that crackles with intensity. While much of the band’s peers in their genre gain hard-edged ferocity from harnessing noise, Growth takes a more measured approach. Driving the song is a snare beat that drones steadily on in a marching-band style. Laid bare against the singer’s gritty but powerful voice and few guitar notes, it sounds more like a funeral procession than any parade you’d want to attend. “Ice Age” does have its moments of noise, though, when the voice leads the charge, rising into an expressive yowl, and soon a full drum kit and fuzzy guitars follow into two stormy refrains. But for the most part, the song gains force from quiet—when the fuzzy swell drops out on the refrain’s final line, “Tell me everything is alright,” or when the song ends on a single, ominous note—and the effect is chilling and magnetic in equal measure. It seems Sweden has lent the world some more musical gold.

REVIEW: Pale Honey

Will Shenton

I hate the term “indie rock.” It’s overly reductive and, at the same time, so vague as to be effectively meaningless. But until anyone can really agree on the delineation between garage rock and lo-fi rock and bedroom rock and basement rock (while providing more than exactly one band as an example of each), and until those distinctions offer any utility to the average music listener (I’m not convinced they ever will), I think we’re stuck with it. So what are we to do with a band like Pale Honey? They’re indie rockers for sure, but their debut LP is so much more than that category implies.

The duo consists of Gothenburg Swedes Tuva Lodmark and Nelly Daltrey, who have been playing together in various forms since elementary school. While it would be presumptuous to say that they have great chemistry, having never seen them perform live, they’re certainly able to transmute their minimalist union of guitar, vocals, and drums into something more enthrallingly unpredictable than it has any right to be. The ingenuity displayed on Pale Honey suggests a creative rapport between the two friends that most groups would kill for.

What makes their sound so captivating is its dynamism. Both within tracks and throughout the album as a whole, they jump from quiet, reserved vocal or synth lines to full-on walls of distorted guitar with little warning—but it never feels erratic. Every move is made clearly and confidently, and though any given tonal shift may be explosively abrupt, it’s always tied back in with an earlier theme. Often, this type of songwriting can come off as muddled or overwrought, but Pale Honey manages to keep it clean by paring everything down to the essentials.

This is most evident on “Youth,” which opens with an almost comically simple synth line. It’s gradually joined by Daltrey’s percussion and Lodmark’s laid-back vocals, until suddenly, with only a measure’s warning, it roars into cacophonous life and holds nothing back for the duration of the chorus. Then, just as precipitously, we’re right back in the opening instrumentation. There’s no hang time, no dallying—when they’re done with a section they move on. “Fish,” “Bandolier,” and “Fiction” follow a similar pattern, albeit with varyingly capricious energy levels.

Pale Honey isn’t all in-your-face guitar fuzz, though. “Desert” is a vulnerable, summery digression that showcases the band’s softer side, and offers a nice counterbalance to what is otherwise a pretty emphatic album. Similarly, “Sleep” closes things out on what might be the record’s only genuinely somber note. There’s a lot going on here, and the duo makes a point of exploring a truly diverse array of sounds.

While we’ll probably have to resign ourselves to simply calling Pale Honey an indie rock band, it’s clear after a first listen that they deserve something a little less banal. Their brand of complex minimalism (paradoxical, I know) is refreshingly original, and allows them to draw on their influences without becoming overly referential. Pale Honey is an arresting debut—one that you absolutely should not miss.

PREMIERE: Baby Jesus (Self-Titled)

Amanda Stern

Baby Jesus, a five-piece psychedelic garage punk act from Sweden, are releasing their self-titled debut today on Ongakubaka Records—as a person preternaturally drawn to spare, lyric-driven singer-songwriters, I can't tell whether I'm the wrong or exactly the right person to talk about it. Not knowing what to expect upon receiving my copy I gamely, and without hesitation, sat down to listen. Imagine my horror, then, when I pressed play and was immediately blasted in the face with the explosive saw-tooth of noise that is the opener, “Nothing’s For Me."

My dog sat up on her haunches and we looked at each other, alarmed. Three seconds later, I felt a strange sensation coming from my head—was I bleeding? No, something else was happening to me. Was I...bobbing? Yes, I was bobbing (!), and rhythmically, in time to a chord progression I recognized, embedded in a masterful fusion of genres and references. Sensing no danger, my dog plopped back down and we rode out the album together becoming, ten tracks later, quite possibly the world's most unlikely advocates of psychedelic garage punk. No, scratch that. Of Baby Jesus.

Consisting of five grade-school friends now in their twenties, Baby Jesus plays with the assuredness of musicians twice their age, and they’ve created some of the most controlled and glorious noise compositions I’ve ever heard. The nods and allusions to eras past don’t feel like mere winks or asides—rather, one hears a lifetime of passionate listening and devotion to music in its purest forms. There’s atmospheric range in every track, calling up improbable source material: the Beatles, the Doors, Nirvana, the Ramones, the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction, Sal Mineo’s pouty mouth, and Gidget, watching a surf competition on the beach. Despite all these various impressions, though, this isn’t a derivative album. It’s purposeful and articulate, a beautiful homage to heroes harnessed through a unique and original sound.

Recorded live in one night, which is hard to believe given their cohesion and control, the band's exuberance and onstage vivacity is immediately apparent. The album’s first eight tracks blast and flow easily into one another, occasionally sounding like alternate versions of the same song. That consistency is maintained until the last two cuts, the most psychedelic, which take a slow and soft turn and signal the listener to begin winding down. To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded a more even distribution of range from one song to the next.

But the songs aren’t the only compositions here. The album itself will be available on a cassette which has been dipped in high-quality (but sadly not real) gold. The band brought in their good friend Olle Soderlund to design the album art, and the entire package has a limited-edition feel to it. It's something that would look good in a collection, regardless of your musical taste. This just goes to show that Baby Jesus does indeed live by their glorious motto, one all artists should strongly heed: “It’s not a hobby.”

In addition to the cassette and digital copies of the album, Baby Jesus will also be releasing a vinyl LP on San Antonio's Yippee Ki Yay Records in late June.