PREMIERE: Peace Be Still - Hoaxer

Will Shenton

Though it's only 15 seconds long, the intro to Peace Be Still's latest EP, Hoaxer, says a lot about the album to come. Nigh-indistinguishable from some kind of Andrés Segovia classical guitar bit, "Intro in E Major" initially seems like a strange opener for a post-punk group that howl as much as they sing—but when coupled with the closing instrumental track, "Romantic Dying," it reveals that behind the lo-fi aesthetic is a band very much concerned with precise, intricate songwriting.

That said, Peace Be Still are anything but stuffy or academic. "Intro in E Major" quickly gives way to "Part I: Softy," a track that channels the best of slacker alternative and sounds like it could've been ripped from a Sebadoh record. "Part II: Jay Masquez" follows suit, while "Part III: Flutter" is a much more pared-down song, featuring a single distorted guitar and the lead vocalist's desperate, agonized shouts.

The classically-influenced, three-part structure is a compelling take on a genre that usually prides itself on being haphazard, and it forces the listener to view the EP as a thoughtful, deliberate piece. Hoaxer may be short (the longest track is barely over two minutes), but it resonates well beyond its runtime.

REVIEW: Fazerdaze - Morningside

Laura Kerry

Fazerdaze, AKA Amelia Murray, started a few years ago in the Wellington, New Zealand–born artist’s apartment in Auckland, where she was pursuing a degree in music. Murray’s path to her first LP, Morningside, is filled with many different apartments and rooms. Released on New Zealand’s legendary Flying Nun Records, her album is bedroom music in the truest sense—written, recorded, and produced in her home, where Murray says she is most comfortable with her art.

The term “bedroom pop” functions on multiple layers in Fazerdaze’s music; not only does it come from her bedroom, but it often addresses it, too. Murray’s songwriting contains the immediacy that comes from working out feelings through the act of creation. Much of that processing, like her music, seems to happen in the space of a room. “Are the walls getting closer as I’m getting closer to you?” she sings, conflating feelings and place before the release in the chorus of “Lucky Girl.” In “Half-Figured,” she sings, “In my room / I’m so consumed by things that haven’t happened yet,” enacting the “over-thinking” that she describes throughout the song.

Beyond those two songs and the confines of her four walls, Murray displays a self-deprecating, self-reflective streak in her lyrics that is oddly charming. “Don’t you know I’m shit at having friends / I’m sorry I can only do my best,” she admits in “Friends”; “I’m trying not to try so hard for you,” she sings in “Shoulders”; and in “Misread,” she asks, “Have I misread the way I feel about you?” Fazerdaze exhibits the same plain earnestness of artists such as Frankie Cosmos (for whom she has opened), who package the rich excavations of introversion in simple but impactful girlish pop. Fazerdaze is less twee than Frankie Cosmos, though, and some moments in Morningside even pack a punch. “Misread,” for example, backs biting lyrics with fuzzy power chords, and in “Friends,” a quiet verse with shaker and bass escalate into a near-shouting chorus over grinding guitar.

Not all of Morningside is tinged with self-doubt, sad reflection, and punches. There’s joyfulness in the instrumental swell at the end of “Last to Sleep,” the dreamy synth on “Jennifer,” and hints of ‘90s pop in the final song, “Bedroom Talks.” Murray makes pop, after all, and even in its most pensive moments, the album is bathed in sunniness. Though many of the songs are about the difficult parts of being a person in love (romantic or otherwise), they are love songs nonetheless, and underlying their various emotional journeys is the feeling that Fazerdaze lands on in the beginning of the album, that she’s a “lucky girl.” In these versions of love songs, we see the artist reaching beyond herself, way beyond the walls of her bedroom, into the hearts of a growing number of followers. We predict that it will continue to take her much further.

PREMIERE: Pregnant - Dead Dog Head

Laura Kerry

In the art of collage, we tend to direct our focus on the process more than on the end result that it yields. We talk about it in terms of the materials incorporated—chair caning or a newspaper in Picasso, images from magazine advertisements in pop art—and the steps taken to put them together. In music, collage has come to be more seamlessly incorporated into the final representation. Known by another name, it is called sampling, and it’s a practice that has made its way into the mainstream, largely unrecognized unless the sample is widely known.

What happens, though, when a song is all collage? In the new track, “Dead Dog Head,” Daniel Trudeau’s project Pregnant shows us. Comprised entirely of stitched-together soul and funk samples, the song dances between different sounds, resembling its constituent parts but also forming something entirely new. It feels like walking down a psychedelic hallway and overhearing different conversations as you pass—a horn section, a banjo, a soulful round of the phrase, “I’ll be a real dead dog head.”

But the the collage is so cleverly crafted that none of these fragments feels too shocking, and you’re always compelled to keep walking forward. Off of Pregnant’s new LP, Duct Tape, (out 6/30 via Golden Brown, Copper Mouth Records, and Plastic Response Records), “Dead Dog Head” previews Pregnant’s experimental expedition—bringing the methodologies of collage back to the foreground. Strangely, though, even in a song that is all sample, the seams disappear, and we’re left with a strange pop orchestra to follow and a beat to tap our feet to.

Pre-order Pregnant's forthcoming LP, Duct Tape, on Bandcamp

REVIEW: Marbled Eye - EP

Laura Kerry

Marbled Eye’s “Former” begins with guitar feedback that rings out like an alarm. It grows louder slowly, and subtly dips before another guitar starts its anxious pattern along to urgent drums. This introduction, the first few notes of the band’s new EP, isn’t complicated or particularly strange, but it demands the listener’s attention and signals what’s to come in four songs of jittery post-punk. As “Former” marches on through audacious guitar licks, moments of dissonance, and monotone vocals, the feedback sounds occasionally in the background, keeping the listener on edge just as she begins to settle into Marbled Eye’s propulsive rhythms.

A group of four started by Chris Natividad and Michael Lucero, Marbled Eye’s members come from other Bay Area bands, including Meat Market, Golden Drugs, and Unity. This, combined with the uptempo post-punk on their self-titled EP from last year, has earned them some buzz and comparisons to Total Control, Kraftwerk, and early Parquet Courts. The second EP deserves that and more. It is a crisp album that shows an even greater range for the band, despite its brevity.

In the four songs on the new album, Marbled Eye is more restrained with the fuzz that permeated the first, leaving other devices to burrow their way into our brains. After “Former” comes “Dirt,” a comparatively sparse song with a bouncy bass that recalls Of Montreal and a catchy guitar riff that remains in your head for hours. The band’s signature monotone vocals return, but at a higher register and with greater gestures towards openness. But for every buoyant move, there’s another that grinds more aggressively; they punctuate each catchy guitar riff with another comprised of dense dissonance, and guitar feedback continues to ring in the background. Though “Feast” contains thicker layers of fuzz, its rhythmic repetitions and clearcut chorus lend the song a clean, deliberate feeling, and on “Objects,” precise, meandering guitar lines push against the steady beat of droning vocals.

Throughout the EP, those vocals are hypnotic. Expressionless and unwavering, they not only invoke the post-punk style of Total Control, but also the more chant-like form of spoken word poetry. Often, the vocals in Marbled Eye’s music gets swallowed by other instrumental voices, and they form a kind of wordless rhythm. When the lyrics do take shape, though, they are delightfully enigmatic and urgent—frequently conveying odd images and always in the present. There’s “Hanging up a dirty mirror / Walking on a hollow leg” in “Objects”; “This is what I require / This is what I desire” in “Feast”;  and a “hundred-day-old wilting flower” in “Former.”

Part of the pleasure of listening to Marbled Eye is that even when it’s impossible to decipher exactly what is happening and why, the images, rhythms, and sounds tunnel down into the mind and stay there. Their new EP grabs the listener from the first note of ringing feedback and doesn’t let go until the last guitar abruptly extinguishes.

TRACK REVIEW: Swoon Lake - Bloom

Laura Kerry

A couple measures into the crisp guitar arpeggios and a warm sweep of mellotron, Melodie Stancato’s voice emerges in “Bloom,” carrying strange images with it. “When the earth forgets how to decay / And when the ghosts can't remember what to say,” she sings reflectively, unfurling a poetic landscape in a sometimes-fluid, sometimes-sharp melody whose lines bleed into the next. This is the world of Swoon Lake, the Brooklyn-based trio—Stancato, Paul Weintrob, and Lucinda Hearn—who aptly describe their music as “ghost folk.”

“Bloom,” more than any song on their last EP, Like Being In A Mouth, is ethereal and abstract, guided more by mood and tone than structure. The guitar arpeggio continues through the song, guiding it with a steady rhythm, but the synth underneath lends a dreamy echo as other instrumental voices dip in and out. A guitar woozily wahs, keys step back and forth, and for a short while, quiet percussion lends a faint heartbeat to the otherwise disembodied song. Though hazy, the melody remains clear enough to maintain momentum and coherence. The track muddies a bit when an organ enters in the middle, but it is brief and the song soon darts forward.

Preserving clarity throughout “Bloom” are Stancato’s lush vocals. Just as the instruments drift into ghostly echoes, her voice shifts and slides unexpectedly. Sometimes it's deep and sturdy, soulfully sliding into words; other times, it's as ethereal as the song, wandering up into higher registers where it meets beautiful harmonies. Though the vocals provide no clear path through "Bloom"'s imaginative setting, they serve as welcome companionship for meandering. Swoon Lake has given us a welcome place to get lost in.