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Cross Record, “Crush Me” (Ba Da Bing, 2025)

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This latest release from Emily Cross’s long-running solo project is an absolute stunner that beautifully marries the intensity of prime Nina Nastasia with art-damaged slowcore melancholy and further ices that wonderful cake with viscerally wild eruptions of experimentalism. Fittingly, the album’s backstory is similarly colorful and compelling, as Cross has been working as a death doula in Dorset, England (her usual collaborator/Loma bandmate Dan Duszynski remains back in Texas) and a label interested in the album’s demos encouraged her to “push her imagination to the limits.”  

Cross gamely embraced that challenge and summoned an international cast of musicians for a two-week recording session in Germany. Unfortunately, the label’s enthusiasm unexpectedly dissipated and Cross was left with an uncharacteristically expensive album, disappearing collaborators, a mountain of isolated recordings, and no label, but the passions of Marcin Sulewski, Seth Manchester, and Ba Da Bing’s Ben Goldberg eventually helped shape that would-be disaster into a finished masterpiece. In fact, the transformation of these songs amusingly reminds me of the moment in The Wizard of Oz in which an already great black and white film suddenly blossomed into gloriously vivid technicolor.    

The result is a hauntingly beautiful and poetic album that feels like it is in a permanent state of collapse, as Cross’s hushed and intimate songs often sound like they are happening while The Rapture unfolds, burning planes fall from the sky, and the earth rips itself open. To my ears, the album’s glorious centerpiece is “Dorset Area of Natural Beauty,” which deceptively opens with a church organ improvisation mingled with raucous laughter before blossoming into one of the most achingly gorgeous and dreamlike songs that I have ever heard in my life. The rest of the album seesaws back and forth between melodic would-be hits like “Charred Grass” and weirdo experimentation like “Right Thing By Me,” but the unifying thread that holds everything together is an unwavering knack for brilliant arrangements, as Crush Me is an absolute feast of snarling strings, strangled feedback, collapsing beats, lush chords, unusual harmonies, and volcanic crescendos of blackened, gnarly distortion.  

Listen here.    

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“Flux Gourmet Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” (Ba Da Bing, 2024)

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I acknowledge it is only February right now, but I believe I can confidently state that this soundtrack will be the weirdest and most mystifying new album that I will encounter this year. The film itself was released back in 2022 and follows the trials and tribulations of an imaginary performance art group during a surreal and contentious month-long artist residency. It is an absolutely brilliant and wickedly funny film (possibly director Peter Strickland’s finest work) and joins similarly deranged fare like Holy Mountain in the pantheon of cinema so audaciously batshit crazy that it is hard to fathom how it was ever financed, cast, or released. As befits such a bananas endeavor, the soundtrack features a murderers’ row of compelling artists from the experimental/psych fringes, drawing participants from Broadcast, Nurse With Wound, Stereolab, Neutral Milk Hotel, Swans, and elsewhere. Obviously, that seems like a solid recipe for a unique album, but it is a unique album with a twist, as the heart of it all is Strickland’s own Sonic Catering Band, a shifting collective devoted to transforming the preparation of vegetarian meals into ritualistic noise performances.

The Sonic Catering Band allegedly formed as an anonymous ensemble in 1996 after finding unexpected inspiration in a bout of food poisoning. The band’s mission statement is quite simple (if comically niche): “to employ a similar approach to electronic music as to (vegetarian) food; taking the raw sounds recorded from the cooking and preparing of a meal and treating them through processing, cutting, mixing and layering. No source sounds other than those coming from the cooking of the dish are used and as a commitment to artistic integrity, every dish is consumed by all members of the Band.” The project spawned a record label (Peripheral Conserve) as well, releasing work by many of the folks who appear on the soundtrack as well as some other hard-to-categorize art provocateurs like The Bohman Brothers and Faust’s Jean-Hervé Péron. Unsurprisingly, the project also resulted in some truly memorable-sounding performances (“on the wall by the table hung a lifesize 5ft gingerbread man with headphones on, listening to the sound of himself being cooked.”).

The band portrayed in the film is quite a bit different from the actual Sonic Catering Band, as it is centered on an uncompromising visionary played by actress Fatma Mohamed, but they otherwise mirror the SCB’s quixotic commitment to artistic purity and vegetarian cuisine. Therein lies the big caveat with this album: there is a huge artistic constraint looming over everything, which unavoidably steers much of the music into noise/dark ambient terrain (sizzling, frying, blending, and chopping sounds filtered through chains of effects). There is also a hapless journalist in the milieu whose unrelenting bowel problems provide further scatalogical grist for uncompromising sound art.

In the context of the film, the food-based pieces are quite mesmerizing, but a lot of that appeal is due to the visually striking and ritualistic nature of the performances. As decontextualized sound art, however, brief pieces like “Death Borscht” and “A Pain I Can’t Hold In” feel like teasing excerpts from a killer noise show rather than substantial stand-alone compositions. The album is also strewn with shapeshifting variations of a considerably more melodic Heather Trost piece that serves as the film’s theme (a harpsichord-driven psych-pop confection). Similarly, Roj from Broadcast contributes his own recurring and shapeshifting piece (“Trip To The Shops”) that is roughly in the vein of NWW’s self-perpetuating feedback loop epic Soliloquy For Lilith. The actual NWW piece on the album (“Hindu Monastery Breakfast”) is considerably more nerve-jangling, resembling a rattling tea ceremony hosted by someone plagued with uncontrollable tremors. I am not sure if that necessarily counts as a recommendation, but it certainly made me want to crawl out of my skin in discomfort.

My favorite piece is a solo work by SCB associate Daniel Hayhurst, as his “Monday Service” is an echoing spoken-word fantasia in German over a backdrop of gnarled and heaving sounds that organically form and dissolve in unsettling fashion. I also enjoyed Marta Salogni’s “Cross-Contamination” quite a bit, as she deftly transforms a simple bass pulse into something that feels both seismic and cyberpunk. That said, the album also works quite nicely as a whole for those in search of a sustained fever dream mindfuck, as I listened to it on headphones while blearily wandering through my house in the middle of the night and instantly felt like I had been dropped into a supernaturally tinged nightmare. That is no small achievement for a project that modestly began with little more than a tofu recipe and a mischievous sense of humor. As far as I am concerned, Peter Strickland was already an international treasure as a director alone, but knowing that he can also turn something like a crêpe or a Christmas pudding into a harrowing noise assault makes me love him even more. Hopefully he will continue to find people willing to finance his crazily indulgent whims forever, as the world is sorely lacking in artistic visionaries blessed with such a scathing sense of humor and healthy appreciation for the absurd.

Listen here.

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Big Blood, “First Aid Kit” (Ba Da Bing/Feeding Tube, 2023)

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This latest LP from Big Blood is their first for Ba Da Bing and a spiritual successor of sorts to Do You Want to Have a Skeleton Dream?, as the band are back in “full family trio retro-pop extravaganza” mode. For the most part, Quinnissa (who was apparently only 13 when this album was recorded) handles the lead vocals for a series of hooky, bass-driven garage rock nuggets, though there are also a couple of headier Colleen-sung gems for fans of the band’s darker, more psychedelic side. Notably, Caleb’s frayed yelp is entirely absent from the proceedings, but it probably would have felt out of place among the unabashed throwback pop fare. Moreover, First Aid Kit feels like a full-on Quinnissa showcase, which makes for a rather unique entry in the Big Blood canon, as she is one hell of a belter and also spontaneously improvised all her lyrics during recordings. As Caleb notes in the album description, being in a band with your teenage daughter is admittedly something of a messy and volatile situation (“lots of practices end with her being tossed from the band”), but I can see why they are sticking with this format, as Quinnissa increasingly feels like a pop supernova in its formative stages.

This album’s overall feel is something akin to a raucous wedding reception in which members of The Cramps and B-52’s join forces for a spirited and spontaneous set of half-remembered ’60s bubblegum pop covers. The opening “In My Head” represents that vein in its purest form, as it is built from little more than a meaty bass line, a simple thumping beat, and a subtly surf-damaged guitar tone. The most perfect iteration of that aesthetic comes much later on the album, as “1000 Times” feels like a raw and raucous cover of an imagined classic by someone like The Ronettes. Elsewhere, the dark paranoia of “Never Ending Nightmare” is yet another notable Quinnissa showcase, though its unsettling subject matter is nicely invigorated by a bouncy bassline, quirky percussion, and a killer chorus hook. Quinnissa also handles lead vocals on “Infinite Space,” but that piece feels like a comparative anomaly more akin to Big Blood’s non-Quinnissa fare. It still feels a bit unusually anthemic and driving for a Big Blood song, but reaching infinitely to space is a more traditional lyrical theme for the band and there are some very cool howling psych touches in the periphery. Admittedly, a lot of Quinnissa’s lyrics sound like they were composed by a 13-year-old, but as the album’s description insightfully observes, “teenage impulses fit right in with the band’s intent, which is making music that’s honest, inclusive and flawed.” To their everlasting credit, Big Blood seem to be endlessly resourceful in their balancing of flawed spontaneity and thoughtful art, as Mulkerin harvests “the ghostly presence of past takes” as a subtly trippy background layer throughout the album.

To my ears, the strongest pieces on the album are “Ring Telephone Ring” and “Makes Me Wonder.” The former is a Barbara Lynn cover transformed into a smoldering, psych-damaged slab of country heartache and beautifully continues Big Blood’s near-unbroken run of perfectly chosen and brilliantly executed homages to their favorite songs. It is also a prime example of this album’s unusually nuanced approach to psychedelia, as Colleen’s sensuous vocals leave a ghostly haze of harmonies in their wake. Similarly weighty is “Makes Me Wonder,” which is dedicated to Ma’kihia Bryant, an Ohio 16-year-old murdered by a cop. Given its dark inspiration, it is unsurprisingly a fiery piece, but it is also a wonderfully driving and lushly psychedelic one, as Mulkerin allows himself to go a bit wild on the production side, resulting in a swirling feast of harmonized Siren-esque vocals, field recordings, sound collage elements, and dreamy synths (courtesy of guest Chris Livengood). It almost feels like it could be a stomping, muscular Kate Bush cover that plunges into a gently lysergic rabbit hole, as the gorgeous chorus hypnotically repeats as the piece descends deeper into hazy trippiness. The closing comedown “Weird Road Pt. 1” offers yet another throwback to more traditional Big Blood fare, as it is a Colleen-sung reverie that seems like it is built from little more than harmonium drones and a lazily swooping synth melody (though the buried ghostly vocal layers add a wonderfully hallucinatory touch).

As far as album-length Big Blood statements are concerned, I would personally categorize First Aid Kit as a fun (if uneven) detour rather than a fresh classic, but the album’s reception thus far indicates that I am in the minority on that. I suppose it all depends on which side of Big Blood one prefers: the fun, spontaneous and punchy side or out-of-body transcendence of songs like “Destin Rain.” For those of us in the latter camp, First Aid Kit will probably never be in heavy rotation as much as some other Big Blood albums, but “Ring Telephone Ring” and “Makes Me Wonder” would certainly earn a place on the imaginary self-curated greatest hits retrospective in my head.

Listen here.

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The Dead C, “Rare Ravers” (Ba Da Bing, 2019)

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The Dead C have been on an impressive hot streak in recent years, so it was a reasonably safe bet that I would be delighted yet again by Rare Ravers. However, I was definitely not expecting such a revelatory leap forward this deep into the band’s career. Immodestly described as “recorded and burned through a thousand galaxies of dust and doubt and endless infinite wonder, transforming both time and space,” this album feels like it was conscientiously sculpted to ravaged perfection in an actual studio and it sounds absolutely amazing. As it turns out, The Dead C’s long history of rehearsal tape-level sound quality and shambolic, messy self-indulgence concealed the fact that they were secretly an extremely tight band capable of unleashing firestorms of howling guitar noise with the precision of a scalpel. I imagine some fans are still holding out hope that the band will someday return to writing actual songs with lyrics and vocals, but this album is an instant classic as far as I am concerned.

Much the recent Armed Courage and Trouble albums, Rare Ravers is roughly composed entirely of 20-minute pieces that each fill an entire side of vinyl, though in this case there is a two-minute interlude (“Waver”) separating them. The opening salvo, “Staver,” erupts with a characteristic snarl of distortion and feedback, but Robbie Yeats’ insistently steady and unwavering snare and high-hat rhythm quickly cuts through the maelstrom and drags the song forward through the buzzing, crackling wreckage. That howling mass of distorted ruin never goes away (this is a Dead C album, after all), but in this case it turns out to be the mere foundation for something more structured and compelling rather than the sole raison d’être. 

That said, the omnipresent snarl and sputter still play an absolutely crucial role: if I saw a cool art show where the gallery was shuddering and collapsing around me, that context would be every bit as memorable and essential to the experience (if not more so) than the art I was ostensibly focused on. In this instance, the nod to structure and an overarching vision is quite a modest but effective one, as “Staver” is anchored by a repeating bent note that sounds like a deep, anguished moan. Notably, the piece briefly seems to collapse into directionless noodling around the halfway point, but that proves to be a cunning feint, as the smoldering ruins soon spring to life with a flurry of atypically sharp and audible drumming. The resurgent piece then goes on to finish in strong fashion, as Yeats’ return signals the beginning of an unexpected second act in which the hollow animal moan of the first half slowly converges with a wobbling, pulsing, and insistent swell of distorted feedback.

Following a brief descent into the shuffling, sputtering psych-murk of “Waver,” the album’s superior second half is ushered in with the sputtering sludge avalanche of “Laver.” Again, that is fairly well-covered Dead C territory, but searing howls of strangled feedback soon start viscerally streaking through the chaos as a ramshackle groove lazily starts to cohere. The recording quality plays an essential role here, as the recurring blasts of snarling guitar noise are beautifully intense and physical. That proves to be fortunate, as the rest of the song completely drops out for a while, leaving only a series of howling noise eruptions punctuated by stretches of near silence. After that, it briefly dissolves into an interlude that sounds like a panning and undulating shortwave radio transmission. The piece soon lurches back to life though, cohering into a slow, heavy groove of muscular drums and snatches of clean, melodic guitar. The roiling entropy underneath is the real show, however, as it sounds like there are blood-thirsty noise demons attempting to tear their way through the veil of distortion. 

Again, the crispness and clarity of the recording plays a major role, as creaking of strings and the intricacies of the feedback squalls are able to gradually seize the foreground from both the beat and the melody. That is optimal, as Michael Morley and Bruce Russell unleash an absolutely glorious tour de force of screaming and distorted noise squall. Lest anyone get too concerned that The Dead C are approaching perfectionism or compositional rigor, however, “Laver” ends by being abruptly cut off mid-note. Maybe that actually is perfect though, as the only appropriate way for this album to end was probably for an amplifier to explode or the recording desk to short out from signal overload.

It feels very wrong to describe a Dead C album as flawless, as the band’s aesthetic has always been a fundamentally broken, corroded, and deconstructed one, so I will instead say that Rare Ravers is an album that is impressively devoid of any wasted time, directionless meandering, unrealized potential, or half-baked ideas. I was similarly struck by the volcanic power that this threesome can unleash when they are focused and allow some degree of professionalism to creep into their recording process. 

The Dead C have always been great at sounding like a shambling, jagged, and brilliant mess of a band, yet the occasions where they could rightfully be described as “face-melting” have been few and far between. Rare Ravers is legitimately face-melting during its howling crescendos. Similarly, the sheer ingenuity of Morley and Russell warrants praise as well, as the two have somehow managed to avoid repeating themselves again and again despite their hyper-constrained palette of blown-out bass and feral feedback squall. It is like watching a magician keep pulling rabbits out of a hat that cannot possibly contain any more rabbits. The Dead C have been a fitfully great band for decades, but they have truly defied the odds and blossomed into a reliably formidable and tirelessly evolving unit over the last several years. For now, Rare Ravers feels like a high-water mark, but I have no doubt that Morley, Russell, and Yeats will soon surpass it if they continue on their present trajectory.

Listen here.

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Sarah Davachi, “Gave In Rest” (Ba Da Bing, 2018)

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This latest album, Davachi’s second of the year, continues the compelling and accelerating evolution of her distinctive vision. In fact, Gave in Rest features some of her most experimental and uncategorizable work to date, incorporating Renaissance-era instrumentation and compositional ideas to create something resembling a spectral secular mass of sorts. While the results of this ambitious divergence can occasionally feel sketch-like, uneven, or less than seamless as Davachi explores unusual structures or revels in the joy of pure sound, the bulk of the album is quite good and a few pieces are absolutely sublime. Even if it does not quite rank among Davachi’s strongest releases, Gave in Rest is the album that departs most radically from her comfort zone and delves the deepest into unexplored territory.

The last year or so has been one of considerable creative and personal upheaval for Sarah Davachi, relocating from her home in Vancouver to Los Angeles, with an extended detour into Europe along the way. It was that period of relative rootlessness in Europe that arguably had the greatest impact on shaping the direction of Gave in Rest, as she spent a lot of time in churches—sometimes performing in them, but more frequently just basking in the calming atmosphere and reflecting upon the textures and interplay of various instruments in that unique acoustic environment. Consequently, it is no surprise that most of the instrumentation used for this album falls very much within traditional “church” territory, or at least sounds like it does (there are allegedly some synthesizers sneakily lurking amongst all the organ, piano, mellotron, and choral voices).

Aside from that, Davachi’s deep interest in early music additionally manifests itself in a curious fondness for the recorder. In fact, the recorder is the sole instrument in the album’s deeply unusual and abstract opening piece “Auster.” It is a very perplexing choice to open the album, as it is more of a fragmented meditation on the properties of the instrument than it is a composition: Terri Hron played a sequential series of sustained pitches and Davachi time-stretched them into a blurred and oscillating haze. 

It is an interesting idea, but it never becomes anything more than a slow-motion flow of disconnected tones, making it more of an extended prelude than a substantial part of the album (despite being the longest piece). It kind of sounds like a badly warped VHS tape of someone holding a single note on a ’70s synth, then arbitrarily changing to another note…and then another, etc. With deep and attentive listening, there is definitely some intriguing microcosmic activity to appreciate, but I wish the piece had eventually transcended its initial theme rather than just lingered there.

After “Auster,” the album begins in earnest with a pair of absolutely gorgeous and harmonically rich pieces. The first, “Third Hour” is built from an eerily wraith-like and gently undulating drone that slowly blossoms into a darkly beautiful dance of intertwining violin melodies from guest Jessica Moss. More than any other piece on the album, “Third Hour” achieves a hauntingly effective balance between the corporeal (the tormented violins) and the incorporeal (the smoky, billowing drones), as well as an emotional power from shifting swirls of uneasy harmonies.

The elegiac “Evensong,” on the other hand, sounds like a ghost mass, as mournful angelic voices flutter around a somber piano motif. The rest of the album is quite good as well, but it is more focused on experimentation than beauty, though the two occasionally blur together at times. The best piece among the remainder is “Matins,” which is an extended exercise in layered and subtly transforming pastoral drone that is inventively curdled by uncomfortably harmonizing and stammering flute-like tones. 

Elsewhere, “Gloaming” and “Gilded” more explicitly explore Davachi’s recent fascination with achieving a kind of indistinct, floating stasis, as both resemble a hazy locked groove that glacially blossoms into a fragile, understated crescendo. In fact, “blossoms” is exactly the right word, as each feels like watching a flower slowly bloom via time-lapse photography.

The pendulum unexpectedly swings the other way for the closing “Waking,” however, as it captures a long, unaugmented take of Davachi playing a Baroque-inspired organ motif. Like the other bookend “Auster,” there is only one instrument, yet “Waking” is otherwise its complete opposite: rather than remaining in relative stasis and quietly exploring harmonies, “Waking” is beautifully melodic and bittersweetly melancholic. While it is superficially quite a traditional piece that would not raise any eyebrows in a church service, it is sneakily one of the most compelling and quietly stunning pieces on the album, as the trail of harmonies that the slow-moving melody leaves in its wake is both heavenly and hallucinatory.

Between “Waking,” “Evensong,” and “Third Hour,” Gave in Rest essentially amounts to a half-great album that fitfully features some of Davachi’s strongest moments and many of her most unconventional ideas. The only real caveat is that not all of her ideas made the leap into fully formed compositions. As such, this is probably not the best album for the curious to introduce themselves to Davachi’s oeuvre, though fans will certainly appreciate her willingness to break new ground and avoid repeating herself. I certainly enjoyed it, though I hope she continues to explore this direction further, as Gave In Rest feels more like a promising taste of a compelling new vision than it does its definitive statement.

Listen here.

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TALSounds, “Lovesick” (Ba Da Bing, 2017)

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Natalie Chami is best known for being one-third of Chicago’s Good Willsmith, but she has also been a prolific solo artist, releasing a slew of cassettes on labels like Hausu Mountain since 2011. Love Sick is Chami’s debut full-length and it is quite a stunner: based on Chami’s past, I was merely expecting a suite of atypically skillful analog synth sketches and experiments. Instead, Love Sick is a gorgeously sultry and blearily hypnagogic feast of visionary outsider soul. 

Happily, most of Chami’s experimental and improvisatory impulses survived that transformation intact, which is what makes this such a unique album: Chami does not downplay her more lysergic and unpredictable edges so much as find a way to shape them into languorously seductive hooks. When that happens, some great songs result, yet the more impressive achievement is how Love Sick coheres into such an intermittently dark and absorbing whole, like an erotic dream that subtly morphs into a nightmare.

Chami has quite an unusual background for someone making a sexy bedroom soul album, as she is both a member of an established improv/experimental music ensemble and a classically trained vocalist. The latter seems to only manifest itself in Chami’s cool assurance as a vocalist, but her experience as an improviser/analog synth artist clearly had a lot of influence over how Love Sick was performed and recorded. 

Aesthetically, however, Chami seems to be far more of a kindred spirit to her stated influences Aaliyah and Sade than, say, Alessandro Cortini. Love Sick‘s simple template is established quite quickly and effectively with the opening “I Saw The Way”: a lovely, slow-moving chord progression; some understated synth hooks; some hallucinatory textures fluttering around the periphery; and a whole lot of cooing, breathy vocals. 

One significant item that is missing from that list is any kind of beat or propulsive bass line, which seems like a very deliberate decision for a couple of reasons. For one, Chami took a very pure, organic, and spontaneous approach to crafting these pieces, performing everything live and improvising her loop-heavy vocals with no overdubbing. More significantly, her entire aesthetic is a deeply understated and blissed out one. Love Sick certainly has a lot in common with pop music, but it does not sound so much like sexy R&B as it does like sexy R&B that has been dissolved into an undulating haze. Chami’s aesthetic is essentially a bittersweet dreamscape of simmering passions, yearning, and languorous eroticism.

Occasionally, however, Chami will throw in a sampled beat, as she does on the stumbling and stutteringly gorgeous would-be single “Disgrace.” If the vocals were removed, it would basically just be a killer patch of densely throbbing bloops and chirps over a lurching, broken-sounding beat that would be a highlight on any contemporary analog synth album. In Chami’s hands, however, it becomes a rapturous bit of hallucinatory pop heaven filled with lush harmonies and oddly halting and precarious-sounding vocal phrasings. 

As much as I enjoy Chami’s endless supply of cool synth motifs and her talent for crafting appealing hooks, it is probably the almost uncomfortable intimacy of her vocals that elevates Love Sick into such a compelling album. At her best, Chami is not a synth wizard dabbling in soul/R&B pastiche—she is a bedroom pop Brian Wilson trying to distill a swirl of ineffable emotions into elegantly woozy, blurred, and breathy dreampop (and she just happens to wield a synth quite skillfully too).

Chami is not entirely pop-minded though, so Love Sick is also peppered with some more atmospheric pieces and an occasional bit of indulgent spacey weirdness, such as the lysergic and proggy “You’re Trying To Drive.” I tend to like the “pop” songs the best though, as there are already plenty of artists making fine dreamy ambient or retro-futurist analog synth vamps, but no one but Chami (and perhaps prime LA Vampires) can turn out a soulful and sensuous slow-motion jam quite like “My Side My Sign.” 

That said, some Love Sick‘s more abstract pieces are uniquely strange, particularly the closing “Stories,” which is a surreal miasma of hallucinatory textures, blurting synth swells, tumbling melodies, and pure heartache. In fact, it is a perfectly devastating way to end the album, as it feels like all of the album’s gorgeous soft-focus pop structures are ultimately pulled apart and obliterated by a final black hole of regret that ends with the line “I don’t want to tell the story anymore cuz you’re gone.” On paper, that might sound like melodrama, but it is not. Instead, it feels like a final curdled note on an album that seems to try valiantly to condense all the pleasure and pain of a shared life into one short album.

To my ears, Love Sick does not have any real flaws or weak songs, but it can certainly be a challenging and unnervingly intimate listen at times and most of the usual caveats regarding improvised music apply. That said, Chami often does a remarkable job of deftly sidestepping the limitations of live analog synthesizer performance, masking the unavoidably repetitive structure with well-placed hooks, actual choruses, and hallucinatory gnarled intrusions of mangled notes. Also, while I certainly prefer the more structured and melodic pieces, Love Sick‘s more amorphous and atmospheric pieces make the album a far more mysterious and deep affair than it would have been if Chami had simply written a full album of slow jams. 

Of course, the hookier pieces are the immediately gratifying ones, so it took me a while to appreciate the rest, but it was worth the time (it is dangerously easy to initially dismiss the album as a handful of great songs padded by moody filler). Love Sick is a slow-burner, as it has sneakily become one of my left-field favorite albums of the year, hitting a perfect balance between experimentation, craftsmanship, unfiltered emotion, and smoldering intensity. I am tempted to glibly describe Love Sick as the greatest analog synth break-up album of all-time, but that would be a disservice (even if it is probably true): Chami certainly uses heartache and longing as a starting point, but beautifully transcends expectations to weave a truly immersive and complex fever dream where eroticism and pain swirl deliriously together.

Listen here.

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The Dead C, “Trouble” (Ba Da Bing, 2016)

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This latest opus captures The Dead C at their most endearingly perverse, brilliant, and anti-virtuosic, as they have somehow managed to craft a double album without actually having any conventional content at all: no real riffs, no hooks, no grooves, and no songs (unless some mumbling in a sea of feedback counts). That approach seems to tailor-made to alienate most potential new listeners, but the towering monolith of guitar squall that is Trouble is an absolute delight for the faithful like myself. These five sprawling and amorphous pieces sound like someone dropped napalm on rock music, leaving nothing but a smoldering, heaving, and howling wreckage. Occasionally something resembling a melody will emerge from the blown-out entropy, but the album’s real appeal is its visceral chaos. In some ways, this may very well be The Dead C’s finest album yet.

The trio does not waste any time at all in establishing their malign intent, as the opening “One” erupts with a stammering two-note riff amidst a roaring gale of white noise, then the almost-riff disappears entirely to leave a gnarled miasma of distortion and feedback bolstered by Robbie Yeats’ wandering and fitfully spirited drumming. Such a formula hardly seems like ideal grist for a 20-minute song, but somehow Michael Morley, Bruce Russell, and Yeats make it work, seamlessly ebbing into interludes of lazily sputtering guitar noise and almost-vocals, then building back up to eruptions of churning and formless density. 

Unexpectedly, however, the piece ends with an eerily beautiful coda of quivering feedback. Dynamic wizardry and feedback-wrangling aside, I am also particularly fascinated by Yeats’ bizarre drumming choices, as he continually rides the line between lunatic and genius, seemingly losing interest in his beats almost instantly yet somehow maintaining a weirdly appealing and faltering momentum despite himself.

The following “Two” roughly adheres to the same formula, but initially features a fairly coherent groove. In fact, it almost sounds like the band attempted to play an actual song, but were instantly derailed by their inability to control their chain of effects pedals. Even that semblance of order soon disappears, however, and the rest of the piece is a push-pull between shambling, overloaded meandering and rare, ephemeral convergences into actual chords and hints of melody. 

Near the end, the more structured elements seem to finally win and something songlike briefly emerges before falling apart again. In classic Dead C fashion, even the most coherent parts still features mumbled, unintelligible vocals and a guitarist who sounds like he does not realize the song started and is still unhurriedly trying to tune. 

Unsurprisingly, the remaining three songs essentially offer up more of the same, albeit with somewhat shorter durations. While The Dead C do not have any tricks up their collective sleeve, they compensate with their admirably thorough commitment to this aesthetic of snarling and wrongheaded feedback sludge. If the band does have a trick, it is only that they create such an effective illusion of lumbering sloppiness at times that I am still caught off-guard whenever a piece like “Three” suddenly blossoms into a striking passage of strangled notes or hauntingly swooping feedback howls.

If possible, I suspect Trouble might be the most ingeniously incompetent-sounding Dead C album yet, as it is very easy to imagine a guitarist with no fingers or a kid who just bought a drum set being able to happily jam along with it. That is not dissimilar to how some people view free-jazz, yet the gulf between titans like Ornette Coleman and Pharaoh Sanders and mere dabblers and dilettantes is enormous. With Trouble, it would not be crazy to say The Dead C have become the Ornette Coleman of noisy rock deconstruction, as this is arguably their artistic zenith. 

Previous classics like Harsh 70s Reality certainly have better (or at least more accessible) songs, but Trouble willfully throws away absolutely everything that makes rock music great and still sounds amazingly vibrant, dynamic, unpredictable, and complex. It is easy to see why The Dead C is so underappreciated, as this is a singularly messy and uncompromising vision, but I cannot think of any other bands that could produce a satisfying double album without the benefit of hooks, melodies, or strong rhythms. The Dead C admittedly offer some raw power at times, but Trouble would quickly become a numbing experience if that was all they had to offer. What they bring to the table instead is considerably more unique and intangible: an intuitive hive-mind genius for both artfully falling apart and unexpectedly shaping ruin into beauty.

Listen here.

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Natural Snow Buildings, “Terror’s Horns” (Ba Da Bing, 2015)

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After an unusually lengthy period of relative silence, Natural Snow Buildings have returned with a significant departure from much of their previous work. Well, a departure in some ways, at least: both the songs and the entire album are unexpectedly brief and concise. Also, the most memorable pieces eschew the duo’s usual drone and “haunted folk” tendencies in favor of something resembling a lysergic, nightmarish Ennio Morricone score or an imaginary soundtrack to a Jodorowsky film. Otherwise, everything great about the duo thankfully remains, as comparative accessibility has done nothing to lessen Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte’s characteristic spell of haunting and timeless otherworldliness. This is definitely one of the more essential Natural Snow Buildings albums.

Terror’s Horns opens in striking and beautiful fashion, as “Dawn on a Buckskin” evocatively combines a mournful and reverberating Spaghetti Western tremolo-bar strum with massing dissonant drones and a slow-motion pulse of bass drum thud and crashing cymbals. To some degree, the piece calls to mind the Wild West, but Natural Snow Buildings’ version is quite a bit more strange and disturbing than any familiar images from movies. To me, it creates a tableaux that is not so much “gunfight” or “ghost town” as “wounded person stumbling through an empty, flickering, unfamiliar, and hallucinatory landscape.” 

As far as opening salvos go, Mehdi and Solange could not have done better. The following “Saturna’s Black Belt” is both equally short and similarly stellar, again embellishing the hollow twang of the Western with dirge-like, quasi-ritualistic percussion and an ominous miasma of buzzing and swirling drones. Even better is the strangely sickly guitar tone of the central motif. In a mere six minutes or so, Mehdi and Solange managed to plunge me deeply into a twisted, disturbing, forlorn, and temporally dislocated world of their own making.

Lamentably, the album is not able to endlessly sustain such a relentless pace of brilliance and innovation for its entire duration, but Terror’s Horns does offer up at least two other gems, albeit in somewhat different directions. The 10-minute epic “The King in Yellow” is partially a return to NSB’s comfort zone, as it is quite long, prominently features Mehdi’s floating and ghostly vocals, and gradually morphs into a fine drone piece. There is a wonderful twist though, as Mehdi’s vocals occur over a beautifully thorny and broken-sounding thicket of buzzing, stuttering, and stumbling strings. Later, Mehdi and Solange unveil yet another triumph at the end of the album with “Orion is Dead,” elevating their standard dirge-like balladry with eerie vocal harmonies and an explosive crescendo of smoldering distortion, trance-like percussion, and a blearily melodic quasi-orchestral fantasia.

The remaining four songs are generally quite good as well, but they will mostly sound quite familiar to anyone who already has a few Natural Snow Buildings albums. “Twilight Bells, Terror’s Horns,” for example, is a bit of shimmering, twinkling, and undulating ambiance, embellished only by interruptions of deep, hollow moans resembling the shifting of a giant, empty ship’s hull. Later, “People in the Hills” returns to similar territory, mingling buzzing and ominous drones with hollow wooden clacks; lazily jangling chimes; and wordless, spectral vocals. 

“The Sun Tower” is a bit of an exception, however, as it unexpectedly transforms Mehdi’s usual ghost-folk into something quite muscular and metallic with liberal use of distortion and a vigorous boom-boom-thwack percussion crescendo. The lengthy “Rising Portal” is also a bit of an aberration, as its warm and radiant drones do not seem to belong on the same album as any of the disquieting surrounding pieces. I suspect it was included because it has meaning within whatever overarching narrative arc the duo were hoping to weave with their sequencing. In any case, it is a bit too pleasant and straightforward for my liking. 

Curiously, Mehdi and Solange seem to be quite fond of that direction, as the limited edition version of Terror’s Horns came with a second album (The Ladder) that leans very heavily in that vein. Natural Snow Buildings admittedly do ambient drone quite well (they have a distinct knack for texture and layering), but there are too many other artists producing similar fare to make it as satisfying as something like “Dawn on a Buckskin.”

As far as new Natural Snow Buildings albums go, I could not realistically have hoped for anything much better than Terror’s Horns: it may not be perfect, but its high points are very high indeed. Also, I would have been perfectly content with yet another suite of songs that continue to improve upon past themes, so I am both delighted and surprised that Mehdi and Solange instead decided to both try something new stylistically and distill their oft-amorphous and overwhelming aesthetic into something a bit more manageable. It is no small feat for a singular band to completely overhaul its sound without losing any of its distinctiveness. As far as I am concerned, Terror’s Horns is a hugely successful experiment, as half of its songs are absolutely revelatory. 

The sole critique that I have (aside from both the length and inclusion of “Rising Portal”) is that these shorter songs cannot weave quite the lushly mesmerizing and transformative illusion as some of the duo’s best long-form work. That said, however, there is no real need to repeat what has already been done: the world already has many hours of great Natural Snow Buildings epics, so these shorter pieces are a welcome change of pace. Anyone new to the band should definitely start here before plunging into the deep end. Also, this is a great time for any existing fans numbed by the mountain of similar-sounding material to check back in. This easily ranks among Natural Snow Buildings’ finest work.

Listen here.

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Natural Snow Buildings, “Daughter of Darkness” (Ba Da Bing, 2013)

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Ba Da Bing have officially blown my mind yet again, following their 4LP reissues of the epic Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches and The Snowbringer Cult trilogy with an even more ambitious project: reissuing 2009’s incredibly rare and overwhelming Daughter of Darkness cassette series as a massive 8LP box set with hand-painted album art (which took months to complete). While it is not the best Natural Snow Buildings album by any means (no band can make a uniformly great 8-hour album), it is still quite a good one and it is unquestionably their longest, which offers a unique appeal all its own. There are probably are not too many people who find the prospect of plunging into a seemingly endless rabbit hole of roiling, hallucinatory, quasi-ritualistic drone very appealing, but those who do have probably just found their Holy Grail.

Daughter of Darkness is a curious anomaly within the Natural Snow Buildings catalog for many reasons, its staggering scope being just one piece of the puzzle. For example, many of its longer pieces seem quite primitive and monolithic by the duo’s standards, sounding like rather lo-fi and improvisatory experiments in oceanic, multi-layered guitar noise allowed to unfold until the tape ran out. While that is not a bad thing at all, it feels like the formative work of a band who had not yet reined in their more indulgent impulses or turned their attentions towards structure and songcraft.

It is not, however, as Solange and Mehdi had already recorded and released at least two of their most beloved and fully realized albums by that point (the aforementioned Snowbringer and 2006’s The Dance of the Moon and Sun). Also, Daughter of Darkness was recorded in 2008, a year of utterly stupefying activity, yielding two separate triple-albums, 6 CD-Rs, and two cassettes. Given that the duo were already near the top of their game and immersed in a bewildering melange of other projects, Darkness is not a noisy, chaotic, and sprawling monster by accident, inexperience, or youthful over-exuberance.

Consequently, the best way to view Daughter of Darkness is as a conscious attempt to push drone to its furthest possible extreme: this album is far more of an immersive, trance-inducing experience than a mere collection of songs. In fact, there is nothing resembling a “song” at all, though some of the shorter pieces (particularly the rippling, eerie “The Source”) sound very meticulously composed. Actually, I suspect the entire album was meticulously composed on a grand scale, but that is not readily apparent when I am enveloped in the midst of it, as there are long stretches where it feels like the duo are basically treading water for ten or twenty minutes.

In reality, however, they are just working on a very different time scale than I am used to, as such stretches almost invariably give way to something wonderful that makes the whole journey seem both worthwhile and necessary (like the heartbreakingly lyrical feedback interlude lurking within the often harsh, 45-minute “Devil’s Fork”). Also, Mehdi and Solange were just as ambitious with their textures, layering, and detail as they were with Daughter‘s duration, as they regularly make such an unearthly and apocalyptic racket that it is almost impossible to believe that it is coming from two people rather than some of sort of occultist, extra-dimensional army on the march or a horde of demons clawing their way out of the underworld through an incompetently drawn pentagram.

As awesome as that sounds, Daughter actually evokes quite a few other moods as well, which was a very good move listenability-wise. In fact, a few interludes can reasonably be described as warm or beautiful, like the gently quavering outro of “Black Pastures” (intrusions of strangled-sounding guitar noise aside) orthe lush swells of the surprisingly innocent-sounding “Will You Die For Me?”

In another context, some parts of the album (“Body Double,” for example) could probably even be seen as “pretty,” but not in this one: Daughter‘s rare oases of calm are made deliciously tense and uneasy by the fact that they are surrounded by gnarled plunges into the void with names like “A Thousand Demons Invocation” or ancient-sounding funeral processions like “Her Face Is Not Her Real Face.” While many aberrations occur all over the album’s brain-frying duration, the balance of the material definitely veers between roiling, wall-of-guitars drone; quasi-occult death marches; and buzzing Eastern strings and discordant flutes. All of those threads appear on other Natural Snow Buildings albums (and are often better executed there), but the cumulative effect is quite a staggering one nonetheless.

As with most of Natural Snow Buildings’ oeuvre, Daughter of Darkness successfully maintains an unbroken and otherworldly illusion of being field recordings of some arcane ritual by a forgotten and vaguely sinister culture in the very distant past. While it is not nearly as clear, sophisticated, and nuanced as their best albums (possibly because the nuance and sophistication is obscured by the smeary, distorted production), it succeeds despite that, as the sheer scope, immensity, and extremity easily eclipse all details of the execution. The best analogy that I can come up with is this: Daughter of Darkness is less like great, brilliantly realized art than it is like being trapped in a museum that is on fire (while an earthquake simultaneously rages). There would certainly be beauty, vision, and genius all around me, but that definitely would not be what I remembered about the experience, which would be a lot more lasting, deep, and unique than simply seeing a lot of nice things.

(Note: the CD version of this set includes two very long bonus tracks from the Daughter of Darkness V cassette (2009, Recollections of Knulp), which are very much in the vein of the main album. I do not think that their inclusion particularly enhances or detracts from the album in any way, but I will say that it is much more convenient to listen to an 8-hour album when you do not need to keep flipping records over. The vinyl set includes only the songs from the original Daughter of Darkness (2009, Blackest Rainbow), so that might be a better bet for feeble types who can only handle 7 hours of heavy drone in one sitting).

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The Dead C, “Armed Courage” (Ba Da Bing, 2013)

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There is something endearingly heroic about The Dead C, as they have been gleefully blurring the lines between inspired deconstructionist rock and messy, half-assed indulgence to widespread indifference for almost three decades. Unsurprisingly, this latest release finds them obstinately splashing about in the same ambiguously muddied waters as ever. I suspect these two fairly challenging long-form pieces are unlikely to win the trio any new fans, but they are absolutely certain to please the already indoctrinated, as they rank among the group’s finest.

In their early days, Wire famously had a list of rules that defined their aesthetic, dictating that they always “stick to the point” and avoid such perils as rocking out, embracing Americanisms, or needlessly embellishing their songs in any way. At this point in their career, I suspect The Dead C probably have an even more restrictive set of guidelines that likely includes such dictates as “no melodies, no structure, no consistent rhythm” and “never, ever seem like you are trying.” 

While I am being (somewhat) facetious, it is very hard to hear a song like “Armed” and not think that its genesis was anything other than “Hey, I’ve got a great idea for a new song: I’m going to stomp my distortion pedal and play a chord. Then I am going to keep flogging that same goddamn chord relentlessly for the next 20 minutes with no apparent variation. You guys in?”

While I do not think I am being too unfairly reductionist in that description, “Armed” still somehow works beautifully and avoids sounding like any of the “amplifier worship” bands (Sunn O))), etc.) that tread similar-sounding territory. The secret seems to lie both in the details and in avoiding the expected trajectory, as guitarists Bruce Russell and Michael Morley imbue that droning chord with a great deal of simmering tension through layers of snarling wah-wah and distorted sizzle. Drummer Robbie Yeats, for his part, alternates between clattering fills, silence, and an array of tumbling, lurching, and off-kilter martial-sounding beats. The whole effect is quite impressive, resembling a constantly shifting smoldering wreckage of a song that never turns into anything more, yet never gets tiresome.

The second-half of the album, “Courage,” arguably captures the band in “song” mode, as Morley initially mumbles and moans some half-asleep-sounding vocals over an electronic buzz, some tinkling piano, something resembling a beat, and some understated guitar abuse. Gradually, however, Yeats’ drumming gets more propulsive and the guitars get a bit harsher and the piece begins to resemble a perverse parody/homage of a motorik beat, albeit one with a drummer who has no intention of sticking to the script at all. Then, around the half-way mark, all forward momentum halts and the piece gradually transforms into a fading, understated outro of slow-burning guitar noise that again resembles the gutted, ruined corpse of a rock song.

As far as Dead C albums go, Armed Courage is deceptively great: it initially seemed like two shambling, off-the-cuff jams to me, but the pieces all gradually fell into place after a few listens. As inscrutable as these guys are, they definitely seem to be intuitively and inventively improvising against one another in a way that steers guitar noise into a realm that it is uniquely their own. 

Notably, this is the first Dead C album where I have begun to appreciate the mad genius of Robbie Yeats’ drumming, as his unpredictable transformations and derailments of even the simplest of beats keep these two songs sounding like they could go barreling out of control at any moment. That omnipresent sense of danger makes everything Morley and Russell play sound precarious and somewhat tense, which is no simple feat. In anyone else’s hands, an album like this would be crushingly boring: no melodic movement, no cathartic explosions—just 40 minutes of endlessly simmering guitar noise with seemingly random drums and no pay-off. In The Dead C’s hands, however, it is a refreshing and invigorating triumph of bloody-minded wrongness.

Listen here.

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